Mat Bowles

Seriously, there's a major security hole in Internet Explorer that also opens up vulnerabilities in other browsers. Even if you rarely if ever use IE, you need to secure your system if you're running Windows. If you don't know how to, Yahoo! Tech has a handy guide. It's fairly major, several popular websites have been hijacked, one well known webcomic artist got infected while looking at his own comic. MS normally only patch at scheduled times, for them to rush something out this quickly is almost unheard of:

Acting with record speed, Microsoft has issued a patch for the just-announced security flaw that impacts all recent versions of Internet Explorer, from version 5 to the latest betas of IE 8. The next security update had not been due from the company until January 13, making this a very rare occurrence.

Most scary? Up until now, I had thought Opera was a pretty good browser, it's certainly nice to use. It appears though that Opera was subject to the same vulnerabilities as it uses the same XML renderer memory buffer as IE. No, I don't really understand that bit either. So Opera gets downgraded.

If you're still using Internet Explorer for your browsing, really, it's NOT SAFE. No browser is completely secure, but IE is part of the core operating system of Windows, and when there are unpatched exploits, the attack can get directly into Windows itself. By far the safest way to browse^[1] is with Firefox, and it's probably tied after that between Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. Opera remains a groundbreaking bit of software, but if the default behaviour is still to pretend to be IE and also open up vulnerabilities regardless, it isn't as good as it should be.

For the full security shield, Firefox has plugins such as Flashblock, Adblock and NoScript that really do push it to the top. At the very least, Flashblock stops system hogging flash from hijacking your browsing unless you want it to, it's the first thing I install after Fx on a new machine. Always.

Another part of this vulnerability involved Adobe's Acrobat Reader. PDFs are, unfortunately, now a part of life, and there are still many many idiots that put their PDFs online and think they've got a decent web presence. Given this, the PDF download plugin for Firefox is essential, and switching to a much faster and less system intensive reader (I use Foxit) for your default PDF setup is probably a good plan as well.

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[1] I'm ignoring text only and other lite browsers such as Lynx here, just talking about normal, standard plays YouTube vids and looks normal browsers.

Completely unsorted unformatted list from my extension list dumper, I'll probably go back and edit this into something more coherent later but I need the data posted somewhere so here it is:
( Complete dump of firefox extensions, for previous lists see the tag )Those marked disabled don't work (yet) with Firefox 3—hopefully they will when it comes out of beta.

Well, see, the problem with constantly switching PCs is...

I'm spending most of this week on a different computer, but will want to be doing some web developement, so posted mostly for my reference, the addons that I've got installed on the work laptop (which I use for personal stuff when I'm travelling, etc as well):

( Dumped list from Extension List Dumper )
Of the above, I continue to strongly recommend ljaddons, programmed by a Russian, but now does everything LJ Hook does, plus some things other extensions do, plus some things I've not seen elsewhere, and very very customisable.

innerbrat lists her favourite Firefox extensions, and asks:

How have you customised your Firefox? Which add-ons have you used, how have you altered them, and what couldn't you do without?

So I thought I'd do a follow up to my firefox extensions post and list all those not listed there by me that I'm currently losing. A fair few of these (especially Colorzilla and Submit to Tab) are great little tricks that you guys told me about int he comments, others I've just added as I go along. I now have FAR TOO MANY extensions, and am likely to dump some, and split others off into a separate profile full of development tools and not use them for geeral browsing. And, unfortunately, LJ Login clashes with deepestsender currently, so given I rarely if ever use my other accounts I have it disabled.

( List of firefox extensions )
As before, are to wherever the developer says they're based. If they don't link to a download page, blame them, not me, but you can search Mozdev by name to find em if you want them. Back to IB:

I want you guys to do the same with your Firefox.

I know there are some physicists and other science types hanging around, this looks very cool, but it's way beyond my normal abilities to get the basics of science.
Quantum computer solves problem, without running

“In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running,” Kwiat said. “That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn’t get any more mysterious than this.”

From jackthomas

Oh yeah; the performancing plug in for Firefox is great, as is the Livejournal Hook extension; both are on addons.mozilla.org