Terminal emulators: December 2008 Archives

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.