Netcraft just released a toolbar for Firefox that among other things protects users against Phishing attacks. They released a version for Internet Explorer months ago and this new release equals the playing field. The interesting thing is that the IE toolbar has only been downloaded about 100,000 times over all those months, whereas the Firefox version was downloaded 60,000 times in the first few hours of it’s release. This seems to show that Firefox users are much more concerned about their security then Internet Explorer users, (hardly surprising really all things considered.)
In other browser news, Netscape 8 breaks some XML rendering functionality in Internet explorer. Microsoft has apparently recommended that people get rid of Netscape 8 and use Internet Explorer (hardly surprising advice from Microsoft really). I can’t think of anything safer for users then to have a broken Internet Explorer, but unfortunately this bug only affects the display of XML data and some people take that kind of think personally. Netscape 8 is a good browser and has some innovative features, but it seems that they really rushed though the beta and release period without enough diligence. They (AOL) have indicated a fix is in the pipeline and should be available next week.
