Tech Center Current

If you’ve been closely following the world of software security, especially in relation to web browsers, you’ve probably heard about a recent URI handling problem found in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox which could allow a website to execute malicious code on your computer. There has been a lot of confusion about this issue, and even some major technology news sites have misunderstood the situation. I will attempt to clarify the issue here.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple gave the web development world a nice surprise when it released a beta Windows version of its Safari 3 web browser. However, the excitement was soon muffled by a growing number of problems.

Web applications have been all the buzz lately. Traditional desktop applications for e-mail, calendars, and basic word processing have begun losing favor to the online versions you can use in a web browser. Google has so far lead the pack in web application development, and they have recently released a tool which will help take web applications to the next level.

Secunia, a major software security tracking company, recently released a report which found that 28% of popular software installations miss important security updates. This means that the users of that software have neglected to apply the critical security updates provided by the vendors. The data was gathered through Secunia’s free “Software Inspector” tool, which is currently only available for Windows users. The statistics covered 4.9 million popular software installations, 1.4 million of which were missing vendor-supplied fixes for security vulnerabilities capable of compromising the system.

Google recently conducted a large-scale study which showed that about 1 in 10 websites attempted to install malicious software like viruses, spyware, adware, or other malware without the user’s knowledge or consent. About 1 in 4 websites had links or other content leading to malicious software.

If you’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser for a while, you should make sure that you are using the latest version. By mid-May, Mozilla will have officially ended support for Firefox 1.5, which was released in late 2005, and they are encouraging everyone to upgrade to version 2.0.

Net Applications, a web metrics company, has released a newsletter featuring its March 2007 web browser usage statistics. These attempt to measure what percentages of the Web’s users are using which web browsers.

Web browsing has become so commonplace these days that many people aren’t even aware of what a web browser is. A web browser is the program you load to start looking at web pages. I’m not talking about things like Google or Yahoo — those are search engines, which are loaded by the web browser. The Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop, and Home buttons are part of the web browser. Your Favorites or Bookmarks are part of the web browser. Every webpage you visit, including search engines, is accessed and displayed to you through your web browser.

The Firefox web browser has just added APNG support to its development versions, meaning it will appear in a future release. APNG is an animated version of the popular PNG image format, solving one of PNG’s main shortcomings to the GIF format. APNG was designed to replace MNG, a different animated PNG format that never took off because its design was seen to be unnecessarily complex. The APNG specification hasn’t yet been finalized, but is expected to be once the PNG group approves a minor change.