Silicon Shecky

Well, it seems that another problem with Active X Video has gone Zero Day. Drive by (click by?) attacks are now exploiting the hole in the MS972890 advisory. This only affects IE, and only XP and 2003, so yes it is rather limited, but XP and 2003 are still very prevalent in the world.

The advisory does have a link on how to work around the vulnerability with a kill switch setting on the DLL file. Just shows another reason why I would not use IE if the web site does not require it.

So I finally decided to check out Chrome for myself. With all the hype and talk about it, I figured I better at least see what it is like.

The install took far longer than what I had expected for a “streamlined” installation. Once installed, it was never able to finish copying settings from my Firefox, and yes I let it sit there for a good 30 minutes as I walked away from my computer to take care of other things.

The little popup at the bottom as you go over links I found annoying, especially considering it woould sit there with a message even whn not over a link. One forum I go to which has some long threads, it was not able to process the threads properly. I found the layout to be simple, but coming from other browsers, a little confusing, especially as to where bookmarks and other items were hiding.

Personally, I don’t think Chrome is all that good. To me it just another thing to confuse people with. Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari, all have been around for a while, and while I have used them all except Opera, I know that people swear by each of them. Chrome just muddies the playing field with a not ready for prime time experience.

So Chrome updates itself silently, which can be a good thing, unless the patches require a restart of the browser. If this does happen you all of a sudden get a notice saying, “Changes have been made, you need to restart for them to take effect, ” or something along those lines. I get it with Firefox also. IE doesn’t do that, which is why it can’t be as secure.

Anyway, I digress. It seems that in the pas month Chrome has had to do some major patching quite often. People talk about how secure Chrome is, and while I haven’t tried it yet, I do have to wonder if it is being heavily targeted, or did the developers just make that many misses on bug testing?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3324#more-3324

So with all the browser choices out there, how many do you think have more problems than they know because of security through obscurity?