Apparently the grass is not always greener–at least, not as green as it looks–on the other side of the fence. Firefox has been found to have some serious vulnerabilities that have been declared “extremely critical”.

Please read: Zero-Day Firefox Exploit Sends Mozilla Scrambling.

It was laughable when Microsoft suggested that people remove Microsoft as a trusted publisher for installing software on IE. Unfortunately, Mozilla’s situation is no less ludicrous, suggesting that users disable JavaScript, and Mozilla’s update sites are redirected to stop exploit code from targeting the vulnerabilities. What a mess.

Truly it can be said now that Firefox is no panacea to the web security world that some people–perhaps with skewed perspectives–might have thought.

Respected companies like Mozilla and Apple are not some think tank giants with impervious code. They will be making mistakes just like Microsoft has and does. As long as they scramble to fix the security flaws and work hard to avoid future ones, I’ll continue to have respect and confidence in them, because they’ll be doing more than Microsoft does.

For the first time in a while, I am posting a positive post regarding Microsoft.
Please read: Internet Explorer improvements come to light.

For the first time, my impression of Microsoft’s plans for the IE 7 update is promising. In the past, Microsoft promised increased but incomplete support for CSS (including CSS2). Whereas this is a good thing, such a promise left unclarified promises nothing but necessary changes in code to reinstate compatibility with IE in our websites.

But a recent comment on IEBlog by Chris Wilson added: “Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that Web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely.”

If this is what they mean when they promise increased but incomplete support for CSS, then I am completely fine with that! My concern is Microsoft fostering an atmosphere where developers constantly have to baby their sites to maintain compatibility with IE. However, if IE were to work similarly to all other browsers, then this concern vanishes–for the moment.

Granted, such a promise is only genuine if a stream of updates is promised to maintain compatibility. In other words, another long hiatus from IE updates would leave us in a state no better than we are at present.

What Microsoft will do remains to be seen.