The end of an era...

[JohnRBaker]

The end of an era:

RIP, Internet Explorer

Microsoft's much-maligned internet browser will soon be officially retired.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/micr...officially-retired_n_62a89a6de4b06594c1ce876b

In all honesty, I was never a fan of IE. I mostly used Netscape and am a user of Firefox today (even on my Mac).

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[electricpete]

Internet Explorer Jokes To Help You Say Goodbye (March 17, 2015)

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(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[JohnRBaker]

As I said, back in my PC days (that was only at work since at home we've always been a 'Mac house') I used Netscape and stayed with it as the company formed the Mozilla group which eventually released Firefox. I continued to use Firefox both at work on my PC's and my laptop, as well as at home on my Mac's and still use it today.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[electricpete]

Browser wars is something that plays out in certain sectors of the internet (my browser is better than yours!).

I'm a chrome guy, but it has it weaknesses. I don't keep my credit cards or passwords stored in it (use bitwarden for that) and I tweak the settings to try to minimize data collection. I do enjoy the tight integration with other google products. Edge and Brave are forks of chromium (the open source version of chrome).

Firefox is arguably the only mainstream browser not based on chromium in some way. Ironically among strident privacy advocates, the coziness of Mozilla with Google is one of the biggest criticism of Firefox (like how Firefox makes google the default search engine, and a few other things). It seems all of the small players have to make some kind of deal with the big guys to be viable (recent news DuckDuckGo privacy focused search engine.... allows microsoft to track you).

If you look at a test by The PC security channel of Edge vs Chrome vs Firefox exposed to browsing 200 pieces of Malware, Edge stopped 100%, Chrome stopped 99% and Firefox stopped only 72.5%.

On that basis I might be hesitant about Firefox on Windows, but the whole thing is a muddy and evolving picture (you can find something to criticize every browser).

I've become pretty interested in device digital security lately. I have the feeling that the ability of malware to intrude and disrupt our lives will increase. Intelligence agencies have scary capabilities, red team penetration testers and white hat security researchers have significant hacking expertise/tools... and all these things tend to diffuse over time towards a wider audience of potential bad guys. I think (with reasonable precautions) the risks tend to be greater on PC than on mobile.... because (at least on the operating system level) the mobile systems are simpler and the Windows system is very complex. By the way, a clean bill of health on a virus scan on PC is almost meaningless... a lot of the newer malware is "fileless" and not detectable by traditional scanning, and you can find videos on that same PC security channel where malware easily disables Windows built in Firewall and also the built in anti-virus. (I use Comodo free for firewall and manually do anti-virus scans with Malwarebytes, Comodo free, along with the Windows built in anti-virus).

There is also a big sector of people that I interact with on the internet (reddit) that have huge concerns about privacy (as opposed to security), to the extent they think google and the US government are the biggest "enemies" from whom we need to protect all our data. There is no doubt a balance, but from my own perspective, most of those people seem to have too much focus on privacy and not enough on security.


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(2B)+(2B)' ?