Michael Gracie

Now everyone can browse in harmony!

Microsoft has “released” it’s own version of Firefox (and someone released a few laughs this morning as well).

Among the requirements for the new, improved browser:

- A quad-core 4.6 Ghz CPU (for Hotmail)
- 5 GB of RAM
- Microsoft peripheral integration (or else)
- Spyware-laden Powerpoint plug-in

The company is accepting all major credit cards for purchase of this new/improved version of otherwise free software.

Heh.

Two hackers outlined a potentially serious Javascript flaw in Firefox, and the powers that be were not happy.

Snyder said she isn’t happy with the disclosure and release of an apparent exploit during the presentation. “It looks like they had enough information in their slide for an attacker to reproduce it,” she said. “I think it is unfortunate because it puts users at risk, but that seems to be their goal.”

Mozilla leaders then proceeded to beg for mercy, reminding everyone listening in that $500 goes to the person that reports a hole in Firefox (versus the alternative of creating a botnet ring and picking up tens of thousands from the spamming).

My take - you are not going to get the underworld on your side through small bribes, and you certainly aren’t going to get them to stop outing vulnerabilities. You should embrace the latter, and use your oodles of money to fix the problems instead of whining about them.

If you don’t, you’ll just be….uh…..Internet Explorer.

There is a piece of malware floating around that masquerades as a Firefox extension, but I’m not too worried.

The trojan, called FormSpy by McAfee, targets already infected computers (which means it probably has a great distribution base). But the extension it is trying to portray a plugin that allows users to navigate websites using keyboard numbers - that tells me its good for folks that don’t have a functioning mouse to do the same.

The breaking news is that at least one operating system no longer has to suffer. I can hear it now:

“It is recommended that Windows users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox.”

My better judgement was tossed on the front steps this last Wednesday, the moment the MacMall sales associate told me there was no sales tax on products purchased online, for delivery to me.

New release Apple Powerbook G4 12 inch with Superdrive. 80gb hard, 512mb RAM, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0, etc. etc. Oops.

Now for some initial thoughts after tinkering around with it for the last six hours…….
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