Weclome to becoming mainstream — now you people have to deal with success too.

Sounds more like anti Firefox rant than anything else. As the rest of the people here said, nothing is 100% secure….at the very end is in the users hands.

I once built a machine for a friend…..once every month I had to clean up over 4000 whatever-ware files, so I installed Firefox on it. Next month was the same, and the next.

I ended up installing 2 Antivirus (Zone Alarm Suite and F-Prot32), 3 anti spyware tools (Ad Aware, Spybot and MS own), had the 2 firewalls enabled, enabled ALL the features of pop up blocking, ad block in ZA, added site restriction and even parental restrictions in both ZA and IE. I scheduled all the tools for auto update and to have all of those tools scan the machine once a day, Auto protection was on, etc etc etc.

Guess what? Next month I had to clean up over 4000 files again….I got tired and told him I was going to treat him like a client and not a fried and charge him for the clean ups….no more spyware.

Admittedly not many people will have heard of the application but it is quite useful

http://www.ghostsecurity.com

And how, pray tell, did I find myself in this near “lockdown” condition? I habitually & usually run Firefox without allowing Java & Javascript run-permission[s], plus I use “Proxomitron” (v 4.5J) as a local web-proxy. In order to see the above-mentioned “Warning”, I had to enable both Java/Javascript, then disable Proxomitron (reloading the desired website after each action).

Running Firefox as I usually do, I would *never* have seen the aformentioned *undesirable* popup/window. In my humble opinion, Firefox is *more* than safe-enough. Then again; “Stupidity knows *no* season”, re users who enable their browsers to run “Everything, ALL the time.”

Otherway a few warning is much better, than a not working, but important page (your banks homepage for example).

Security is not the main reason I think the most people would prefer Firefox. Internet security always has to depend on the user. You can’t make a much more secure browser than Firefox or IE. If you’re afraid of these thing you can still use Lynx.

If the window says Publisher authenticity cannot be verified, it means that the applet was not signed by a certificate that your browser reconizes. If it says that that the security certificate was issued by a company that is not trusted, that means that the party that signed the applet did not setup a verification with a certificate company that your browser trusts.

Even accepting a signed applet by a trusted company does not mean that you are safe. It only means that someone paid a certificate issuing company (that is trusted by your browser) money to be allowed to use a code signing certificate issued by them.

A good rule of thumb is, “If you don’t trust the website operator to have access to your computer, don’t accept the signed applet!”