Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Update on that Internet Explorer bug....

As you may or may not already know, Mighty Microsoft today sent out patches for fixing the problems with Windows and Internet Explorer. Their cure isn't exactly like the one I suggested earlier, but mine was close. I recommended disabling Adobe's Flash Player. Microsoft didn't go quite that far, but uses a rather complicated method for preventing the activation of that Flash Player by web sources you haven't authorized. My way was simpler, but might prevent certain visuals on web pages from being shown. Microsoft's method avoids that.

But for whatever it's worth, after I killed Adobe's Flash, and began using the Google Chrome browser instead of Microsoft's, I haven't noticed any problems in the way that web pages are displaying. Everything looks just as nice as it did before that problem came along. I hasten to add that I don't usually use the Internet Explorer except for times when I might want to search a Microsoft site to find a particular Knowledge Base Article, or find something relating to Windows. Most of the time, my browser of choice is one of the others, such as Firefox, or Chrome, or Opera, and I have all of those installed, ready to use.

And if I may say so, I think it's disappointing that after all these years of being software experts, Microsoft's people haven't yet come up with a browser that's
'bulletproof' against hackers and malware attacks. Other browsers like Firefox or Chrome seem to have better protective features, and that's becoming more important with each passing week lately. I have to wonder if Microsoft is putting enough resources into keeping its browser, Internet Explorer, up to date. And that is why I usually use someone else's. I like Firefox, because it has a large selection of add-ons and extensions, such as 'Better Privacy' which can root out and remove those LSOs, or 'Supercookies' that ordinary cookie-handling software can't detect. 

Those LSOs (Local System Objects) have been called supercookies because they never expire, and they can perform executive tasks like a program does, and they send home your information like spyware does, and you don't have any way of detecting them without a special program like the add-on 'Better Privacy'. Normal anti-virus programs do not seem able to detect them, and there may be dozens of them in your system if you have never done a search for them using this special program. And it isn't available for Internet Explorer. It's a Firefox add-on. Need I say more?

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