The Weekend, part 1: Computer

[bobquasit]

On Saturday we had to make an emergency trip over to Teri's mother's place so I could look at her computer. She thought she had a bad virus. Since I'd installed all of her security software, I was concerned.

It turned out, though, that she wasn't infected. She was getting an attempt to infect her system, one of those browser-exploit bogus antivirus attacks. Fortunately she didn't click on anything, and her security software was up-to-date enough that her system wasn't infected.

But I made an interesting discovery. I'd installed Firefox on her system, and told her to use that instead of Internet Explorer. Nonetheless she was using IE when she nearly got infected. She was looking for directions to an event in Rhode Island; IE was defaulting to searching with Bing, and Bing was bringing up a malware/exploit site within the top three results. That's what my mother-in-law clicked on.

But when I used the exact same search terms in Google, that exploit site DIDN'T appear; the correct site did, instead. So Bing seems to be more hacker-friendly than Google. And she certainly didn't select Bing; Microsoft must have done it for her. So just to be safe, I replaced the guts of her IE program with Google's Chrome Frame. That's a neat feature that speeds up IE and makes it more secure and modern. It's also a brilliant way for Google to undermine IE and replace it.

Comments

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

Yes, but either way you're still using IE, as it's integrated into Windows and is used to browse folders and files. So everything else is a shell on top of it regardless of what one does.

Wanna see something neat? Open a folder with the address bar enabled and type in a web address and seewhat happens? Your folder will become a webpage.

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, Chrome Frame isn't just a shell - it replaces some IE code with Chrome code, particularly for rendering. Several articles have said that it effectively "guts" IE, which sounds good to me. :D

I knew about that address bar thing. It IS neat, although I rarely use it.

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

I couldn't replace the IE code because that's the browser for Windows, and Windows wouldn't work if it did. You'd basically be replacing the entire core O/S. But if it did, you'd be using the Chrome I/O to browse your folders. That's how integrated IE and the Windows browser is.

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

I installed it on my mother-in-law's computer, and she's had no problems. And the articles I've read all say that it replaces some - not all - of IE's code. That's all I know!