but here’s a question, why don’t they just put these settings in by default? there must be a reason… its like why do they have ‘extra’ strength tylenol. when i have a fricken headache, i want the strongest, legal medication i can get. whay would ANYONE settle for regular strength???
and on star trek… why is it that the enterprise can always go a little bit faster with ‘a few modifications’? for god’s sake Scottie! make the dame modifications once so it will always go as fast as it can!!!!

but i digress…

My gift to you…

Let’s settle this once and for all. I can’t take any more of this trash talking.

Personally, my money is on Mark. He’s smaller, but he’s a wirey bastard… and a little psycho.

Secondly, the reason you wouldn’t want to speed it up by default is because some websites will detect the number of simultaneous connections and you will be blocked if you have too many. Many pirate , download and P2P sites will block those users because they want to keep bandwidth down. I’ve never seen a general use site to this though so I’d say you are safe for 99.999% of the websites out there.

Merry Christmas !!!!

Mark, I want a source on your IE “advisory”. The last address bar spoof vulnerability I heard about was in August and it did not affect XP SP2 systems, and frankly anyone running anything other than XP SP2 from MSFT on their daily use internet machines is nuts IMHO.

As Dan mentions, there are a lot of UI spoof attacks with the address bar and status bar (including Firefox’s XUL) that are being used in phishing attacks. This is probably the next security frontier and both “camps” are burning a lot of brain cells in coming up with ways at securing against them.

Instead of spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about IE I would point your users to more useful information and tips. Most of them are pretty saavy, but for the parents and non-technical peeps in the crowd I would say the following:
1. Never follow email links from unknown sources, especially to banking or money related sites. Instead, if you think it is legitimate, open up your browser of choice and actually enter the address to your banking site manually.
2. Because of the security issues banks have generally never communicated via email about online banking issues. Most have a “communication center” right on the site when you log in and you should use that as your primary information source.
3. Even non-technical users should “tune” their systems just like they do their car. Use that auto-update features in your software to ensure you are running the latest (and probably most secure) version.
4. Along those lines, if you are really interested have a monthly glance http://www.microsoft.com/protect to learn more about current security problems and how to protect yourself.

I think Firefox is a good browser with some useful features and I’m sure it will get greater adoption with home users. I’m still somewhat concerned that they are not as secure as they claim to be and I’ve read interesting data to support this, but only time will really tell. They aren’t sitting by idly as MS did with IE for the past 3 yrs so I’m sure more good stuff is yet to come. At the same time, I see they’ve woken up the people at MSFT and they are now actively working on improving their dominant position. If you’re interested have a look at the IE team’s blog … http://blogs.msdn.com/ie. One of the newer articles is all about security threats that really aren’t

PS. I forgot to say thanks for turning on the full RSS feeds. What a treat. Now if you could really help Paul do the same …

Merry Christmas