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dpyers 
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 Topic: German Version of FireFox - adware
Posted: 17 November 2004 at 12:00am |
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=164892&hig hlight=
I guess the question now is what surprises have been put into other language versions. It's sad.
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michael
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 9:36am |
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Well I read the German statement from the translator and if what he says is true it is not really that critical. Thus you never know how sites may start to exploit those reporting features...
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dpyers
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 11:08am |
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Got to disagree with you on that one michael. If IE was reporting some of my browsing or search criteria to adsense without telling me, I would be mad and disgusted.
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xeerex
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 11:25am |
 dpyers wrote:
If IE was reporting some of my browsing or search
criteria to adsense without telling me, I would be mad and
disgusted. |
But it already DOES do that all the time without you even asking. I
challenge you to use IE for 5 days of "average browsing" and then run
an Ad-Aware or Spybot scan. Report it back. Then do the same with FF,
although I guess you need to use the US these days. LOL.
Here's a perfect example:
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huwnet
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 11:25am |
dpyers wrote:
Got to disagree with you on that one michael. If IE was
reporting some of my browsing or search criteria to adsense without
telling me, I would be mad and disgusted. |
do you use IE? because it probably does monitor you! :)
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dpyers
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 12:36pm |
I use Maxthon about 60% of the time, IE about 30%, and FF/Mozilla about 10% with Opera and Netscape occasionally for testing purposes. I've heard good things about NetCaptor and will probably be trying that in the near future.
But ie gets examined pretty thoroughly by the technical community specifically to see if it reports on activity and so far it's been clean.
I run spyware scanners every 4-6 months and usually find two or three, but they're there due to either deficiencies in the browser or in my browsing habits - not something built into the browser.
Blocking pop-ups and on those that I do allow to pop-up, closing it from the big X or the task bar and never clicking a "close this window" or a "cancel" button seems to help that situation a lot.
There's two things that disappoint me about firefox - they had several security holes and phishing exploits in the beta versions that they never publically acknowledged and never annouced if they were fixed in the 1.0 Pre-release. And although they posture as a user friendly safer alternative, they pull crap like this.
EDIT: To be fair... some of the FF security deficiencies were corrected by XP SP2 which leads me to believe they were more OS related than Browser related.
Edited by dpyers
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xeerex
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 2:24pm |
dpyers wrote:
But ie gets examined pretty thoroughly by the technical community
specifically to see if it reports on activity and so far it's been
clean....
...I run spyware scanners every 4-6 months and usually find two or three,
but they're there due to either deficiencies in the browser or in my
browsing habits |
My point wasn't that IE's code was sending the information. We can't
really know that since the code is proprietary other than using 3rd
party tools to monitor the traffic.
My point was that the poorly designed security allows the average
ignorant user to load their machines unknowingly with crap. Trust me. I
make a living cleaning them up everyday from home and business pc users
so it doesn't help my business to recommend FF.
dypers wrote:
EDIT: To be fair... some of the FF security
deficiencies were corrected by XP SP2 which leads me to believe they
were more OS related than Browser related. |
Good edit. I don't think you could argue with anyone over the sheer
number of exploits found in IE and Windows. Of course, Windows relies
heavily on IE as opposed to Windows does not rely on FF. I'd also submit
that due to the Open Source community, those exploits (and any in the
future) as well as the current European debacle, were found. Exploits in
IE can't really be found until the damage is basically done. Then we
are at the mercy of MS to fix them. At least if I don't want to wait on
the Mozilla Foundation or community to fix a problem in FF, then I have
the choice to hire a programmer to fix it for me from source.
Edited by xeerex
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dpyers
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Posted: 17 November 2004 at 8:14pm |
I'd be interested in your experiences with people using xp sp2. I have a feeling that lots of people turned off some of the sevurity stuff because it was too inconvienient.
You're right about ff open source making it easier to detect and repair deficiencies. All browsers are broken in one way or another and the more eyes on the code, the better the chance of an early fix than a late one.
My issue with FF isn't the quality of the browser or the features offered - still the best one for debugging - as much as it is with the actions of moxzilla.org. Like I said... their actions disappointed me.
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