New Vista vulnerability released

As mentioned on Slashdot this morning, a new vulnerability has been released which shreds all the security built into Vista. Yes, Windows Vista is considered to be much more secure than XP. I was actually starting to use and like Vista on a new hard drive I recently purchased. This newly discovered type of attack depends upon how IE loads .NET DLL’s into the browser, which gives the attacker near full reign over the subjects system.

This is yet another reason I use Firefox over IE. Mozilla really did an awesome job at making Firefox peform better between version 2 and version 3. FF2 had a lot of memory leaks, and in some cases, would eat up as much as 600MB of memory on my machine when testing Portlets I was writing. Now, it rarely goes north of 200MB. It loads much faster and runs faster than IE. The security risks with IE on Windows alone are worth it. Firefox is also much easier to develop for. The add-ons for Firefox are free, and the Firebug add on is bar-none the best Javascript debugger on the planet.

I don’t get why most IT shops are so hesitant to standardize on Firefox. Yes, it is more work than just using the standard IE. However, if you do have mostly Windows desktops, you can still use SMS to push Firefox and all its plugins down to the desktop. It’s not that much more work than pushing down IE7 over IE6.

If you are reading this and still using IE6, then good morning Rumplestilskin. Its 2008. Time to wake up. Rise and shine!