http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=164892&highlight - 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think a lot of people want to believe in FF/Mozilla as an idea - if not as a browser. If mozilla.org releases a policy statement regarding adware and possibly a new security patch/bug disclosure process, it would go a long way with the community.

A good portion of my small business is derived from issues such as spyware in IE.

I tend to agree with your approach to SP2 - the definition of "early christian" is "cat food" - but I don't wait 6 months. I usually load up major releases on a test box a couple of weeks after release. I think I wound up installing sp2 on my development boxes about 4/5 weeks after release once I was reasonably assured it couldn't hurt me too bad - lol.

- I'm getting a 404 on the pc-welt link