Life with Linux » Firefox

Macromedia Flash Player for Linux

Michael Hampton — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 03:48:47 +0000

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.

How you install Macromedia Flash Player depends on which distribution of Linux you’re using, though in all cases it will be similar to installing any other software for that same platform. Just find your distribution and follow the simple instructions.

Debian: Install the flashplugin-nonfree from the contrib unstable repository.
Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS: The Mid-Pacific Linux User’s Group distributes RPMs for Flash Player 7 which you can download and install.
Gentoo: Run this command as root: emerge netscape-flash
Ubuntu: Install the flashplayer-mozilla package. Run the following command: sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

Did I forget your Linux distribution? Still can’t install it? Drop a note below.

Firefox users can't access Internet Explorer only web sites?

Michael Hampton — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 23:47:07 +0000

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.

Most Linux users use the excellent Firefox web browser for their daily Web browsing, and this is what I’ll be covering here. Firefox, unlike Internet Explorer, is a standards-compliant browser, and one of the amazing things about Firefox is that it’s extensible. You can download and install extensions which add features to Firefox — only the features you want and need.

But some poorly trained Web developers intentionally block out people who don’t use Internet Explorer, even when their sites work perfectly well with Firefox. Gap.com is one such site, and I’m sure there are many others.

A Firefox extension is available for you which lets you get in to sites like this. Named User Agent Switcher, its purpose is to cause Firefox to identify itself as Internet Explorer (or almost anything else) when you visit one of these Web sites.

After you install it and restart Firefox, you’ll have a new item on your Tools menu, called User Agent Switcher. Whenever you want to visit a site that blocks out Firefox users, go to Tools » User Agent Switcher and then select Internet Explorer 6 (Windows XP) from the menu. Then reload the page you were going to, and you’ll get in.

Once you’re done with the site, though, you should turn User Agent Switcher off, by going back to Tools » User Agent Switcher and then select Default. This way, other sites know you’re using Firefox, and the web developers of those sites know not to design sites that block you out if you aren’t using Internet Explorer.

If you want, you can also add a User Agent Switcher icon to your toolbar, by choosing View » Toolbars » Customize and then dragging the User Agent Switcher icon (it looks like a gray Earth) to wherever you want it. I personally have placed it between the Go button and the search box. Whenever you are faking out your user agent, the earth will be in color; otherwise it will be gray.

Finally, if you run across a site that blocks out non-Internet Explorer users, you should complain loudly to them about being locked out, and also consider doing your shopping elsewhere if they continue to lock you out. Remember that companies pay attention to their bottom line, and the idea of losing even a few percent of their revenues could be enough to get them to begin paying attention to Web standards.

Yet another reason Internet Explorer sucks

Michael Hampton — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 08:01:07 +0000

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.

Internet Explorer had such a bug for all but seven days of 2004.

Actually there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs – between the 12th and the 19th of October – 7 days in total. That means that a fully patched Internet Explorer installation was known to be unsafe for 98% of 2004. And for 200 days (that is 54% of the time) in 2004 there was a worm or virus in the wild exploiting one of those unpatched vulnerabilities. . . .

Mozilla and the family (including Firefox, Netscape Navigator and Camino browsers) display a much shorter window of opportunity for a prospective attacker. There were 56 days (15%) in 2004 when there was a publicly known remote code execution in Mozilla and no patched release. . . .

In 2004 Mozilla was not targeted by malware writers . . .

In total, in 2004 Opera had publicly known unpatched remote code execution vulnerabilities for 65 days (17%) – the two “unpatched periods” happened to intersect. There was no malware exploiting Opera bugs in the wild. — Browser Security Test

If you’re still using Windows, you need to stop using Internet Explorer immediately — well, after you’ve installed an alternative such as Firefox or Opera — and then disable access to it. Otherwise you’re just contributing to the security problem.

(Props to Schneier on Security.)