Browsers

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

Kerodo

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo <>
wrote:

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

Lynx. It's never been compromised on my boxen and I've tried...

--
http://www.cotse.net - Use it, you know you want to.
If you're too scared to go look for yourself, ask me
about COTSE. I'd be happy to tell you about it.

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo <>
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

"sponge" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo <>
> 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.

<snip excellent review>

How's the speed these days? I trialled it a while back, but it was
frighteningly slow.

It also slowed the whole machine (turned the test 500MHz Celeron into a very
good P60 emulator! It was measured as slightly slower than the 100MHz box I
used to have, running IE 6). I trust that someone's paid a bit of attention
to that aspect?

Never had a problem displaying HTML with Opera, bar a few rendering and Java
problems (there are a few apparent CSS-related problems in both 6 & 7, but
the will-it/won't-it Java implementation was a bit of a pain).

--

Hairy One Kenobi

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this opinion do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of the highly-opinionated person expressing the opinion
in the first place. So there!

On Fri, 28 Nov 2003 08:59:50 -0000, "Hairy One Kenobi"
<abuse@[127.0.0.1]> wrote:

>"sponge" <> wrote in message
>news:. com...
>> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo
<>
>> 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.
>
><snip excellent review>
>
>How's the speed these days? I trialled it a while back, but it was
>frighteningly slow.
>
>It also slowed the whole machine (turned the test 500MHz Celeron into
a very
>good P60 emulator! It was measured as slightly slower than the 100MHz
box I
>used to have, running IE 6). I trust that someone's paid a bit of
attention
>to that aspect?

Mozilla has improved A LOT! I remember those problems too, especially
with Netscape 6/Mozilla 1.0. It still isn't as quick as Opera but,
then again, nothing is.

>Never had a problem displaying HTML with Opera, bar a few rendering
and Java
>problems (there are a few apparent CSS-related problems in both 6 &
7, but
>the will-it/won't-it Java implementation was a bit of a pain).

That's about the same as I've experienced, plus I had a few pages that
would get stuck in a form because you couldn't POST to advance. That's
due to poorly-written JavaScript, but even though there's still some
of that here and there, it seems like more and more web designers are
getting their stuff straight, and Opera copes very well even with some
pretty bad stuff.

BTW, I should have also included rps1.opera.com and rps2.opera.com in
the HOSTS file I mentioned in my last post.

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

Thanks for all the input! I'm currently using both Firebird and
Mozilla. I like both a lot. Firebird because I like testing and
playing with new software, and Mozilla because I wanted something more
stable for certain occasions. I'm very glad to hear you speak highly
of Mozilla.

I did try Opera the other day, but I don't like it much. Struck me as
something that AOL would write. Too much junk and frills in it. But
apparently a lot of people like it, so there you go...

It's funny. You would think that Microsoft would try to fix up IE
after all the criticisms and maybe ad tabs and a few other things that
almost all of the current browsers have. But apparently they have no
plans to even release an IE 7.0 at all.

For now I'll stick with the Gecko browsers.

Thanks for all your comments...

On 27 Nov 2003 21:45:46 -0800, (sponge) wrote:

>On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:27:39 -0800, Kerodo <>
>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