Comments on: Firefox Myths

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 18:11:46 +0000

I am aware the author of the original Firefox Myths Website at http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html has written comments on people rebuttals at various pages. He posted here under the name Andrew and sent me an e-mail pointing a few things out which is the first comment on this post.

Cheers

By: FreewheelinFrank

FreewheelinFrank — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:06:13 +0000

Hi Mark,

Just a heads-up. The author of this page has been known to post replies in support of his own article under various aliases at blog sites.

See these two blog:

http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/12/19/firefox-myths/
http://www.thingoid.com/2006/01/the-myth-of-firefox-myths/

There’s also some suspicion that, having been found out, he’s taken to posting as ‘anonymous’.

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/01/20/0527238.shtml
http://nanobox.chipx86.com/blog/2005/12/re-firefox-myths.php

Nanobot (David Hammond- author of the ‘IE is dangerous’ ‘propaganda’) has produced a parody of the site:

http://nanobox.chipx86.com/FirefoxFables/

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:54:03 +0000

Throwing dialogue boxes at users normally just gets them to click the first thing they see to get rid of them, it’s a common school of thought.

The new UAP (Universal Access Protection) in the forthcoming Windows Vista is always active and means that whenever you launch a new program or even hings like control panel applets adialogue box will appear stating that Windows needs you explicit permission to run it.
The idea being that it will prevent malware from launching itself without a users knowledge, but when this dialogue appears for the 100th time, users will more than likely just hit permit as an automatic reaction, so I’m not sure how effective this will be. The principal is the same as lots of dialogue boxes though, once you see a dialogue box enough you start to have automatic reactions, even if this reaction is the wrong one.

Cheers

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 08:23:35 +0000

Interestingly, there was a whole scare a while back about malware developers targetting firefox and mozilla using the xpi framework (pages attempting to install extensions on loading, etc, using the “throw enough dialogues at ‘em and they’ll agree” school of thought.)

That one got dea;t with pretty fast.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 01:05:37 +0000

I got an e-mail from the author of the article, he said I could use any of it in my post, so here it is;

“Mark,

You failed to read the begining of the article:

“This page does not claim the Mozilla Foundation is the originator of any of these Myths.”

I would appreciate it, if you could correct this as it is stated clearly at the top.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060117-5995.html

“As good as those numbers are, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. XiTi performed its measurements on a weekend, which means it captured a disproportionate number of home users and comparatively few corporate desktops. Most large companies still use Internet Explorer, so using weekend surfing activities as a baseline for market share evaluations is going to miss out on a lot of IE use.”

“At this point the author tries to argue that by supporting ActiveX controls this somehow makes IE more secure”

I’m not sure why you came to that conclusion, since the point was simply FF is NOT more secure by not using ActiveX.

Verbatim quotes are in ” “. Check again.

There would be no internet without HTML.

The page does not include anything that is not a Myth and it is NOT a comparison guide so please reread the page. You are
welcome to use any of this in your article.

Thanks for the feedback.”

Cheers