With the release of Firefox 2.0 (which should be official on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24th October 2006), the web browser war is once again heat up. The rush of RC3 to final after just a week of release again signifies the worries of Firefox community about IE7’s challenge.
Apart from the user interface differences, lest we forget the differences at the core, which is called the layout engine or rendering engine. It takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It “paints” on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer.
The layout engine exists not only in web browsers but also email clients, media players with mini-browser and any applications that can display web contents.
There are 4 major rendering engines on the market.
Phishing emergence in online communications media allows scammers to reach many more people than ever before and at lower cost, whether through spam, e-mail and instant message scams; faked Web pages; or other online avenues. But the media usually focus on phishing’s consumer impact and seldom look at how various anti-phishing solutions affect the web site owners.
Being a victim of what I call “Anti-phishing Fraud”, it makes me feel wanting to find out how various anti-phishing solutions work. The official explanation for marking one of my pages suspicious according to Microsoft Phishing Filter FAQ is
A suspicious Web site has some of the typical characteristics of phishing Web sites, but it is not on the list of reported phishing Web sites. The Web site might be legitimate, but you should be cautious about entering any personal or financial information unless you are certain that the site is trustworthy.
In addition to IE7, the toolbar and browser solutions in the market include the offerings from EarthLink, eBay, GeoTrust, Google Safe Browsing using Firefox, McAfee SiteAdvisor, Netcraft, and Netscape. The accuracy of these solutions varies from good to useless. The latest study quoted on IEBlog based on Anti-phishing Accuracy Score indicates IE7 is the market leader in terms of accuracy.
The latest Windows Vista RC2 has improved tremendously but you may want to keep using Windows XP until it has gone through a few cycles of security & bug fixes after its official release. Are you aware of the features that are missing if you continue to use Windows XP? Or even worse what limitations Microsoft has imposed on the so-called Windows XP “down-level” features to discourage you from using the older Windows?
Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 running on Windows XP will not run in Protected Mode or support Parental Controls.