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Bruce Kratofil, of BJK Research, is the NABE webmaster.
Windows on the Web- Browser Tips
September 2002
Last month we looked at some of the different browsers out there. This month, we are going to look at a little known feature in one browser that gives it a competitive edge. We are also going to look at a nasty bug in another browser that needs a fix.
Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders
While you may not know their name, you probably know you don't like them. They are the ads, in separate browser windows, that either pop over your browser window, or show up underneath. The new Mozilla 1.x browser allows you to control them.
After starting Mozilla, click Edit, Preferences. Then expand the Advanced category by clicking the plus sign next to it. Then select Scripts & Windows, to bring up a dialog box that looks like Figure 1. Unselect the option that allows webpages to "Open unrequested windows." After that, click OK.
Figure 1- Unselect "Open unrequested windows to eliminate pop-up ads in Mozilla.
Now, lets see if that does anything, by taking Mozilla to a web site that seems to use lots of pop-under windows. (We won't name any names - we will just refer to this site as a very large, very famous Washington DC newspaper.) Going to the home page and three other pages spawned no ads. Later, when visiting the page with Microsoft Internet Explorer, there was one pop-under. Similar results happened at another site that uses pop-under ads. They appeared when using Internet Explorer, but didn't show up with Mozilla.
The NABE site uses pop-ups, but not for advertising. We use them to display charts and graphs that would be too big and slow to view if downloaded with the page. Mozilla won't interfere with these, since they are "requested windows" that only appear when clicking a link.
As we explained last month in WoW, Mozilla and Netscape 6 are essentially the same browser. However, Netscape does not have this ad-blocking feature. After all, Netscape is owned by media heavyweight AOL Time Warner. Mozilla, on the other hand, is developed by a band of volunteers (including Netscape volunteers) and being open source is owned by nobody.
E-Commerce Threat
A very serious security threat surfaced with Microsoft Internet Explorer. E-commerce sites use something called SSL (Secure Socket Layer) as security when doing e-commerce. These rely on digital certificates to identify whether you are dealing with a trusted site. However, security expert Mike Benham discovered that as long as you hold a valid certificate, you can also fake a certificate and pretend to be a site like Amazon.com. This may enable an unscrupulous site to pretend to be someone else, and thus obtain sensitive information like credit card numbers. It won't be trivially easy to do, but it could be done, and enough information is out there to get the bad guys thinking. More details can be found at Brian Livingston's Window Manager column at Infoworld. (Conflict of interest note - Brian and I were co-authors of Windows 2000 Secrets.)
Further investigation showed that the problem isn't with Internet Explorer. The problem is actually with Windows, with which IE is closely intertwined. Therefore each version of Windows needed to be patched, along with other pieces of software such as IE for the Macintosh. If you use Windows, or Internet Explorer, and also do e-commerce over the web, then you should apply this patch. Microsoft's Security Bulletin 02-50 has links to the patches.
National Association for Business Economics
1233 20th Street NW #505
Washington, DC 20036
Phone 202.463.6223 Fax 202.463.6239
nabe@nabe.com
© 2003-2004, NABE®
