Yog
May 11th, 2005, 03:02:11 AM
When it comes to security, there is and always been one important difference in particular between Internet Explorer and alternative browsers like Firefox or Opera.
Exploits in IE may potentially have far more serious repercussions. The reason for this is in how IE integrates with the operating system itself. These are called cross-zone scripting exploits; scripts which not only exploits and causes unintended behavior like DOS or crashes in your browser, but may even establish a backdoor which can compromise your entire system security.
Luckily, MS did put in preventive measures to avoid these kinds of exploits in service pack 2 for windows XP, however the local zone integration does still exist, and exploits of this nature is still possible. In addition there is IEs hazzardous implementation of Active X, iframes and java scripts which is a serious security hazzard on itself for the unaware user.
So what I am saying is, even if Secunia calls the flaws in firefox "Extremely Critical" its still a drop in the sea compared to the potential exploits in IE. I personally would not worry about this at all, and I concider myself fairly paranoid when it comes to Internet security.
There is however a 1.0.4 version on the way which adresses this issue. The beta can be found <a href=http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008121.html>here</a>