Re: Browsers

From: sponge (yosponge_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/28/03 

Date: 27 Nov 2003 21:45:46 -0800

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo <kerodokenny@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>Sponge -- What would you recommend as the most secure browser for
>Windows...

Good question. It's a toss-up between Mozilla and Opera, Mozilla
(Netscape), probably has the best track record in terms of serious
vulnerabilities. Opera, on the other hand, has had a few serious
vulnerabilities (all fixed now as of version 7.22, and nothing close
to the vulnerabilities in IE), but has much better privacy and
security-control features. This and it's raw speed and
user-friendliness are why I use it 99% of the time.

The only drawback to Opera is that, unless you buy it, it will display
ads, and it does have a tracking GUID embedded in it that gets
transmitted to the ad service, Advertising.com, if you click an ad.
However, this feature is (very) easily controlled; you can either 1.
block Advertising.com's servers in your firewall (I include all
Advertising.com servers in my "Spyware Blocklist" and Kerio rulesets
anyway); 2. you can block it with DNSKong, or 3. if you don't use
either, you can simply block all the ad services by adding the lines
to your HOSTS file located at the end of my post. You can easily
change the GUID too, at least on Opera 6.
There is one thing to point out: virtually all websites are designed
to work with only two kinds of browsers. First there's Internet
Explorer, and second there are Gecko browsers (Netscape, Mozilla,
Firebird, Thunderbird, K-Meleon, etc.) I have never not been able to
access a website in Mozilla -- and that's several hundred if not a
thousand over the years -- except for four that were trying to install
spyware. (One was an MP3 site, the other three were the homepages of
spyware and browser-hijacker vendors, which is why they wanted you to
use Internet Explorer.) The moral of the story is, if you can't access
a website in Mozilla, it's a website you definitely don't want to be
visiting anyway.
I've had several websites, in additon to the four mentioned above,
that wouldn't work with Opera. In almost all of the cases, the problem
was cleared up once I set Opera to allow referrer logging. It will
enabled it by default when you install Opera anyway, but since
referrer logging raises severe abuse concerns, particularly when
dealing with spam, I normally have it turned off. (There is also a
hack that lets you do this on Mozilla too, but it involves shutting
down the browser, manually editing the prefs.js file, and restarting
the browser each time you want to enable or disable referrer logging.)
If you're really, really privacy-conscious, using Opera's Delete
Private Data... feature when closing out the browser will delete your
cache, cookies, and other stuff. Personally, I only use this feature
after accessing my webmail account, since there have been exploits
that make use of webmail data, but a lot of people really love this
feature and use it all the time.

HOSTS file to be used with Opera:
127.0.0.1 opera1-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera2-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera3-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera4-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera5-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera6-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera7-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera8-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera9-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera10-servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 opera-report.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 ins1.opera.com
127.0.0.1 ins2.opera.com

Sponge
Sponge's Secure Solutions
www.geocities.com/yosponge
My new email: yosponge2 att yahoo dott com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is the Professional Look Really Better?
    ... > sniffing only for IE and Mozilla. ... > in any other browser, such as Opera. ...
    (microsoft.public.frontpage.client)
  • RE: [Full-Disclosure] Disclosure of local file content in Mozilla Firefox and Opera
    ... I agree that Mozilla has implemented quite a lot of proprietary IE extensions which it should have not done, however reading the innerHTML of an element through document.all does not circumvent the traditional zone security checks already in place. ... Disclosure of local file content in Mozilla Firefox and Opera ...
    (Full-Disclosure)
  • Re: virus patch for VPC
    ... > malware is created in such a way that it depends on IE being the browser. ... I suspect that the redirector kicks in when the page contains certain ... Another popular browser is Opera. ... > expereience of Opera but I think Mozilla is really nice. ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.virtualpc)
  • Re: Howd they do that? vertical collapsing gradient fill
    ... I have opera now...pretty cool. ... | It works in Mozilla, but it doesnt collapse as far as it does in IE6. ... | | browser (Opera, Firefox) and the gradient doesn't appear to collapse. ...
    (microsoft.public.frontpage.client)
  • Re: how to change default browser
    ... > Im trying to change my default browser from mozilla to Opera, and cant ...
    (Fedora)
Loading