On Thursday, AOL, owners of the web browser Netscape, released the new version, 8.0. It was touted as the security-conscious browser for all of us as it took aim to protect users from spyware and phishing scams.
In less than 24 hours, they had to release an update to fix several serious security flaws. Whoops!! Apparently there were 44 security issues that had to be hurriedly patched, which to their credit, the Netscape folks did in a hurry and had version 8.0.1 on the market the next day.
The new Netscape is based on version 1.0.3 of Firefox, and the Netscape folks thought the new browser was immune to security vulnerabilities in the Firefox software that were fixed last week in Firefox 1.0.4. Well, it turns out that Netscape 8 was vulnerable after all.
"We had been misinformed by an external security vendor that the Firefox security issues did not affect us," Netscape spokesman Andrew Weinstein said Friday. "Within hours of discovering that the vendor was not accurate, we had addressed those issues and posted an updated version of the browser."
Netscape, is still facing heat over the security goof-up from Mozilla developers. Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox, on Thursday posted an exploit on his blog to demonstrate that Netscape 8 was vulnerable. At the same time, he pitched Firefox as a more secure Web browser.
"If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products," Goodger wrote.
Sounds to me like the Netscape people were set up to look bad.
Still, Netscape does have some nice new features. It protects users against online scams such as phishing and spyware by automatically adjusting security settings while people surf, based on lists of sites that are known to be malicious and of trusted sites.
If you would like to read a PC Magazine review of the new Netscape, as compared with the newest version of Opera and Firefox, go to:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1815833,00.asp
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