Life with Linux

One of the first things you may notice, the first time you use Linux and start up Firefox to get on the Web, is that you aren’t seeing Flash animations. Flash is a technology by Macromedia that’s used to distribute many different types of multimedia. Usually they are cartoons such as Homestar Runner or Invasion of the Gabber Robots, though Flash is used to distribute other kinds of multimedia presentations, as well. For instance, CBS News uses Macromedia Flash to show video news clips on its own and its affiliate stations’ Web sites. If you’re new to Linux and you’re missing those nice Flash movies, this is what you do.
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As a new Linux user, one of the first things you’re likely to discover during your daily Web browsing is a small number of sites which refuse to let you in because you aren’t using Internet Explorer. Today I’m going to show you how you can deal with sites such as this.
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A study of 2004 browser security data shows that Internet Explorer is the least secure of the three major browser platforms: IE, Mozilla and Opera.

To conduct the study, the Browser Security Test people simply looked at how many days of 2004 each major browser had an unpatched remote code execution bug, that is, a problem which would let an attacker do whatever he wanted with your computer.
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