Mozilla Feeds on Rival's Woes

[Chris]

Downloads of Mozilla and Firefox -- an advanced version of Mozilla -- spiked the day CERT's warning was released, and demand has continued to grow. According to Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation, formed last July to promote the development, distribution and adoption of Mozilla Web applications, downloads of the browsers hit an all-time high on Thursday, from the usual 100,000 or so downloads on a normal day to more than 200,000.

Hackers have long insisted that steering clear of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is one of the easiest ways to protect computers from many of the security threats that lurk on the Internet.

That suggestion is often greeted with apathy or angry accusations that the geek in question was indulging in Microsoft-bashing -- admittedly a not-uncommon activity in hacker circles.

But last Friday, in response to the latest security exploit involving Microsoft products, the usually staid U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, published a warning strongly suggesting that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer should switch to another Web browser, due to "significant vulnerabilities" in technologies included in IE.

Gary Schare, director of the Windows Client Division at Microsoft, said that CERT's advice had been misrepresented in much of the press coverage.

"Microsoft certainly respects the work CERT does to help protect the Internet and users. Regarding the consideration that users switch browsers, it is unfortunate that the published articles have misrepresented CERT's suggestions, and we are working with CERT to clarify their advice," Schare said.

But many evidently took CERT's warning to heart and downloaded Mozilla or Mozilla's Firefox, free, open-source Web browsers developed and distributed by the Mozilla Organization, who resurrected the remnants of Netscape after it was purchased by AOL in 1999.

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[Ash]

I checked my friend's IE and she had so much spyware there it was unreal...multiple pop-ups when Blueyonder.co.uk was opened, all pages routed through mysearchpage.com, that toolbar at the bottom, and after an Ad-aware scan IE just gave a bucketload of errors.

So me & a friend installed Firefox, gave it the IE icon, renamed it Microsoft Internet Explorer, gave it the most simple skin we could (Qute), and made it look as IE-like as possible. Hoping it turns out for the best :)