A Safer Surfing World
When I visit my clients, I find an overwhelming number of them have some sort of virus, spyware, adware, or other malware infection on their Windows machine.
Yes, they could alleviate this issue by keeping their patches and service packs up to date. However, sometimes as those of us that are more technically familiar with Windows know, Microsoft will sometimes release a patch that has not been tested well enough. What happens to those poor, unfortunate users that apply this patch can sometimes be a system that locks up, or behaves erratically.
One source of a lot of the spyware (and sometimes viruses or other malware) are what are known as OLE2 controls, or more colloquially as ActiveX controls. These are plugins embedded in web pages to provide for richer content. They allow web pages to perform tricks that they would not normally be able to perform. Similar web controls available are Java applets and Adobe Flash applets.
Unlike Java Applets and Flash applets, Active X controls do not operate in a security sandbox. What this means, is that they’re allowed to do whatever the author would like them to do, including nasty things on your machine that you would probably rather not have them be able to. One solution to avoid this problem is to use a web browser like Firefox. Firefox will not normally run Active X controls (unless you pay for an Active X plugin). This in and of itself increases the safety of the browser considerably.
Starting with Firefox 3, Firefox also now has the ability to prevent you from viewing web pages/sites that have been flagged as being malicious. It also makes it much more difficult to visit secure URLs (https://) that have self-signed certificates or that have certificates assigned to a domain other than the domain you’ve gone to.
With the new Web Of Trust add-on, Firefox enters a new stage of Internet safety. It includes some new technology to rate websites from being spammers all the way up to being great netizens.
Do yourself a long needed favor, and install Firefox today!