Any time is a good time to download and install Mozilla Firefox. Now is an even better time. According to the BBC News Technology page, “security experts urge users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to switch to another browser until a security flaw is fixed”. Oh dear. Thankfully I do all my financial transactions in Firefox… and while it’s probably not 100% perfect I don’t think security experts have ever warned of something like this.
So do yourself a favour – switch to Firefox and stick with it.
Thanks to Pete the Hampster for the link (yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be spelt in Pete’s world). And also thanks to Lewis Turek who posted the link in a comment (which was held for moderation, cos it had a link in it).
Just out of interest Darren, how does this news story fit in with your assertion that the BBC is Microsoft biased?
I’ve said before that the BBC do report on Microsoft stories, good and bad. Who said “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”? Personally I wouldn’t agree with that 100% of the time. This won’t hurt Microsoft, but it would be nice to think that some people would now download Firefox and stick with it.
I could quibble with the BBC piece actually. It quoted the Microsoft guy (John Curran) highlighting another browser as having the largest number of vulnerabilities and then in the next sentence listed a few browsers such that a reader might think it was any one of those and so stay away from them. I’d say John Curran was somewhat disingenuous in his statement given IE’s market share and the Beeb might have done more to establish the relativities and make it clear something like Firefox was okay.
Still, the report made it on to the Beebs home page which can’t be bad.
A new link on the BBC’s home page
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7787445.stm
And it makes things clearer: “Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Apple’s Safari system are not vulnerable to this current flaw.”
This story is moving quite fast. The Local NBC affiliate in my home town reported the hole on the morning news cast, noting that there was a promised update to be released today. However my best searches have yet to turn up this patch…
Just to prove I can be impartial at times, and although it pains me to post this, I saw this yesterday… “Firefox tops list of 12 most vulnerable apps”:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2304
As Graham Cluley said “Whichever browser you are using you have to keep it up to date”. Very true – I’m using Firefox 3.0.4 and I don’t think the updates have introduced new features.
@5 – it made the news on GMTV this morning so anyone tuning in to see the lovely Clare Nasir report the weather would have heard the story,
It was on the evening news last night as well (not sure if it was BBC or not)
I think this will do some damage to people’s perceptions. There are those people out there that believe everything Microsoft is good (hopefully all non IT workers). At least some realism might creep in, even though as you say it’s not just Microsoft products that have security flaws
Interestingly though, reading that vulnerable apps post comments, it appears that things like IE were excluded from the testing due to the criteria: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12691-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=55469&messageID=1050088