Firefox flaw sparks a fiery debate

[Steve]

On Wednesday, there were warnings of a security hole in the Firefox web browser. After ZDNet picked up on the story, they received quite a bit of talkback from their readers.

TalkBack: Our article reporting the discovery of a security hole in Firefox had elicited a wide range of opinions - both from fans of the open source browser, and those who are less enamoured with it

The news that the Firefox browser contains a flaw that could help cybercriminals to carry out phishing attacks stirred up plenty of reaction and discussion among ZDNet UK readers.

Read the article here. Let's drop the IE/Mozilla war for a moment and consider the REAL issue. How quickly will it be fixed? That is what people should be concerning themselves with, in my opinion at least.

[mattjgalloway]

Mmmm i'm sceptical...

This is the first exploit really seen for Firefox. It's a sad day. But similarily it shows that competition against Microshaft is good. Hackers won't explot it because not enough people use it. Imagine when 20% use IE. 20% use FireFox, 20% use something else, etc... then hackers will have to create nothing or simply something for one browser only. It'll cut down on hacks.

But hey. UPGRADE to FireFox PLEASE! No spyware, No ads, NO CARP!

[Stoo]

The thing is though, The Mozilla Project will fix any security flaws that come to light a hell of a lot quicker than Microsoft would..

People would be extremely niave to assume there is such a thing as a fully secure program, given enough time and motivation, the hacking fraternity would be able to expose holes and vunerabilities in most pieces of code..

[da.Guvna]

I have to say, I tried Firefox 1.0 when all the hype kicked off about it, and I really didn't get on with it.
For a start, the pages I visit on a daily basis rendered incorrectly. And not just small errors here and there...they were really, REALLY annoyingly glaring ones.
Also (and this may not be Mozilla's fault) when I tried to download plug-ins from the Firefox server, I could never get a response from it. This might be down to the fact the servers were so overloaded at the time. When I did finally manage to have a look at some of the skins available for it, I was pretty disappointed. If anything, they just made the base 'Grey' skin look even more ugly.
One thing I did like about it though, was the in-page search function. I liked how it highlighted all the words for you, like google does.

It might not be free, but I'm going to stick with trust Opera 7 for now. It's much better looking, slick, and more importantly, more functional.

Of course, if anyone can suggest to me a list of must-have plug-ins for Firefox that will improve my experience of it then I'll give it another go

[Steve]

da.Guvna: With regards to the rendering of pages, you will find that the majority of the time it is because a web page is coded to work in Internet Explorer, rather than coded to the standards set by the W3C. Firefox obeys these standards far more than IE, but IE of course has the majority advantage. Therefore, it is generally the designers fault, possibly their ignorange (though I'm not saying that is the case all of the time.)

As for plugins - it is still a bit flakey. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I have no idea why. I use flash and tabbrowser preferences and compact menu plugins for firefox. I have never been into installing extensions much.

Still, if you prefer Opera, that's fair enough.

Also, ditto on what Stoo said.

[[GSV]Trig]

Anything that connects to the net will have security holes, its as simple as that, FF still has less holes than IE so I'm stickin with it...