WHICH BROWSER SHOULD USED AND WHY???

 What is a browser? 

 Simplest possible terms it's the program that allows you to surf web pages.  For most people that use Windows their browser of choice is Internet Explorer, but why?  Well, simple answer to that is that it comes built in with your Windows system and it's highly integrated (perhaps too much so) into the Windows operating system.  For most people IE is just fine and you don't really need another browser, but did you know that there are other browsers out there?  Did you know some of them have really cool features?  Well, there is this brave new world of browsers out there and it's time that you take a look and test drive other browsers, after all, just because you have Windows doesn't mean that you have to use IE.  Here is the breakdown of what's out there at the moment


Mozilla -
 It sometimes produces the best programs out there and Mozilla is a happy result of this open source community.  So, let's do a brief little history on Mozilla...many years ago in a galaxy far far away there was a browser that competed with Dark Empire (also known as Microsoft)...this brave browser was called Netscape Navigator.  Well, years of struggle, and finally Netscape on deaths door does something that few expected, it gave away its source code and made it open source and asked a band of rebels to take the challenge of making a better browser than IE...lo and behold MOZILLA was born...yes Mozilla, the first distribution of it basically made this loud thudding sound...oh god was it bad, but still it kept growing, getting better, and soon became THE BEST BROWSER.  Yes, it's grown so big now that it will be stepping on Tokyo soon and the cries of, "Mozilla is coming, Mozilla is coming" will be dubbed with an out of sync English accent.  Seriously though, Mozilla is faster than any browser out there, it meets almost all the internet standards perfectly, and it's a very stable browser.  For my money it's the best value, oh and it's free, yes I mentioned that right?  Yes, well it is free.  You can download Mozilla here www.mozilla.org  .  Many Linux users will be familiar with this browser since it comes as standard fair in most of the Linux distributions now.

Internet Explorer -  
Okay, so, this is  the one most people use.  Internet Explorer has come a long way and it's in many ways one of the things Microsoft succeeded with by paying attention to the internet standards that are currently out there.  I find that Internet Explorer meets many of the HTML, CSS, XML, ASP, PHP, and pretty much any other webpage standard you want to throw at it...why is this good?  Well, it means that the webpage will be displayed as the author intended it to be displayed.  So, it is a very good web browser, however, I find on older systems like Win 95, 98, ME, if you screw up your IE, you screw up your whole damn operating system.  This is where IE is just too integrated into the operating system and this is where you could end up in a little bit of trouble.

Opera - The innovative little browser that could.  What makes this browser interesting is the features it adds beyond the basics of web browsing.  One thing I like is the popup blocker included in the program. Yes those annoying popup ads are bye bye and they stay that way.  It's a small, relatively fast browser, and generally I like it.  It is web compliant, umm, mostly compliant, okay so I have used it and gotten some funky looking pages from time to time.   The Con's of this browser - It costs, umm, $30 the last time I checked...if you don't pay you can have a freeware version that's supported with advertising.  It sort of makes me cringe to pay anything for a web browser, mainly because the best browser is free, but I can't fault Opera for wanting to make money, not every program can be open source.  I think Opera will have it's market in Palm devices because of it's ability to render pages small and to still make them look like web pages.  Give it a download here www.opera.com if you want to give it a try.

GooGle chrome-
From the technical point of view:
One advantage is that when you close a tab, you are virtually terminating the process. This seams to have some interesting implications on the security of the browser. If you corrupt the tab’s memspace then you will crash only that particular process. The browser and all other tabs should continue working just fine like nothing ever has happened.
The advantages are obvious: the user experience is intact. The disadvantages are that pwning might get easier.

Google Chrome also implements a new privacy feature. They call it incognito. Basically if you browse while being in incognito mode, nothing ever gets logged.

Another interesting feature which I need to mention is that popups are not blocked but they open in a minimized window. If you want to see them you just drag the popup icon and there you go. However this may be abused. For example, it will make a huge difference if the rendering engine has already processed the content of the popup even if it is minimized. If this is the case, then this feature could turn into a very handy mechanism of hiding malicious activities.

Google Chrome also provides sandboxing functionalities. Apparently each process is sandboxed. So taking over a process may not result into an immediate pwnage but it will certainly give the attackers some advantage

POSTED BY: PuNeEt KuMaR