Know your Browser: Internet Explorer 9 Beta

So I was going to write up this post last week but decided to give it a few more days of testing to get a good feel for it. I’ve used it every day in my normal work, which consists of going through probably hundreds of tabs throughout the week and almost never closing the browser. Loading plenty of flash and sites with a lot of javascripting.

So what are the results? I would give IE9 Beta a 7/10. It is by far better than IE8 or lower. It does have most of the modern web standards, supporting audio and video tags from HTML5. It is much faster than other versions and more slim and compact. For me it scored a 95 / 100 on the Acid3 test. where IE8 only had a 20/100 and Firefox had a 94 / 100, so a bonus there also. Another improvement I've noticed is that the Remember Password doesn’t come up as a popup but instead a hover over the page at the bottom similar to how other browsers do it. Some of the downfalls to it, is, well that it’s Microsoft. Other than that, visually it does not have some of the features we’re used to in other version of IE. There is no status bar, instead when you hover over a link it shows in a little popup in the bottom. To me I find that annoying. I don’t mind losing some of the web viewing space for the status bar.

There are also very limited good or free add-ons for it as there are in Firefox and Chrome. Although a lot of improvements are built in to it, you can’t fully customize it and make it your own as much as I would like. It also does not and as far as I know does not support default re-opening your last session. Although you can still do it via the New Tab page. Also if you still need to view a site in IE8 or 7 it has an engine switching mode in the developer section by pressing F12. Though the developer section doesn’t seem to have changed at all from IE8 and not nearly as functional as Firebug.

So to sum it up, performance wise it seems good, a far improvement from older versions. Functionality and feel of it is lacking and takes some getting used to. So if you’re a dedicated IE user then this will be awesome for you and the greatest thing ever, and for us web developers, we can’t wait for everyone to start using it when it comes out in full release next year. For you firefox and chrome users it’ll still be a useless blue e icon on your pc, but at least it’ll look prettier.

IE8 Acid3  Test

IE9 Acid3 Test

 

By FreedomChicken

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Lunascape – If you use anything else I feel sorry for you.

First lets start off with what Lunascape is. Well it’s a browser. I know what most of you are saying already, “OMG not another damn broswer” or “I’ll never move off my Firefox, Never!!” or maybe even “WTF there are enough ‘My browser is better than yours’ blog posts out there. I’m out of here.” and even possibly may be thinking, “Grobnar just ate a cheeseburger, how did he do that without a mouth?” But I tell you this, Lunascape really is awesome. They’re not trying to create anything new really. They are just taking the best features of everything and adding it all to one place and taking a lot of nice features and making them native to the browser itself so no need for add-ons.

How Lunascape works is that it’s a browser that renders in Trident(IE, Avant), Gecko(Firefox, Flock) and WebKit(Safari, Chrome). So say you use Firefox and IETab add-on. Well there’s no need for that here it’s built into the browser. You can also split view to say put up a website you’re working on side by side with IE and FF. Again no add-ons required. Other features that are built in and set as default is that when you type in the address bar you don’t have to create a new tab. Just type your URL and go and it’ll make a new tab for you. It also supports all Firefox add-ons when rendering a page in Firefox view it will have access to all of them and you can also manage and install them as well.

Other features Lunascape has is that it you can set a rendering engine with a host, page(and subpages or different subdomains of that pageName) or specific address. There’s also a nice little toggle button next to the address bar to switch between them. Another thing I like is that it doesn’t dumb it down in the terms it uses on the browser. Meaning that instead of just saying, IE, Firefox, Safari it actually lists the rendering engine instead. Just nice to see stuff like that in applications. It also has a huge array of browser options on top of being able to set the options for each rendering engine. Also the search bar can double as an internet search or a find/highlight on page. It can handle RSS, podcasts and even has a news ticker to use some of the empty space on your tab bar if you only have a few open. Last but not least I would like to also bring up the fact that it can be set to sort your favorites either by rank of the ones you use the most or by title so as to help make them easier to find.

By FreedomChicken

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The Hottest New Threat, Clickjacking, and How to Protect Yourself.

I know I have been talking a lot about my teacher, and my Network Security class, but seriously, I am picking up some kick ass stuff in there. Anyway, he mentioned this little nasty in class the other day about a relatively new internet vulnerability called Clickjacking.

This particular threat was supposed to be discussed at the recent OWASP NYC Appsec 2008 event, but was canceled at the request of Adobe until they and other vendors to could work out a possible fix. Adobe was particularly vocal about the cancellation because the vulnerability largely was due to one of their products.

If you haven't heard of it, what it is according to Arstechnica:

The term "clickjacking" refers to a process by which a user is forced to click on a link without his or her knowledge—the link itself may be nearly invisible or visible for only a fraction of a second.

On a much scarier note, this exploit is nearly impossible to defend against, however, according to Giorgio Maone, who created the "No-Script" Firefox plugin, this attack can be mitigated. Maone said in an email to ZDNet's Ryan Naraine, that No-Script can mostly protect you against the attack with the default settings, but for 100% protection you have to look at the Forbid IFRAME option.

Do you know of other methods to protect from this attack? Do you know of anyone that has fallen victim to it? I want to know. Hit me up in the comments.

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