Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Asa, baiting Opera users gets old quick.

Pretty sad that Asa resorts to soft comments re: Opera. The "king of anti-phishing" link pointing to a mozilla.com page feels like Microsoft claiming IE7 superiority by pointing to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

However one must applaud the consistency and frequency of these petty swipes at Opera. There must be a payoff in for Asa somewhere. Some glimpse of achievement, some feeling of joy. However I just don't see it.

Sad.

I love it. They fall for it every time too. Omega: The only time it'll get old is when they don't rise to the bait. ;)

Well, the page is hosted at Mozilla, read it before simply saying "Hey, Mozilla; it must be false", I show the same respect for IE (Microsoft) hosted pages.

Note to Asa: Your Opera link is to a jpg not a page detailing the feature, as I suspect you intended.

Michael,

The Mozilla page you're talking about says:
> Our testing metholodogy and results were audited by iSEC Partners
> to ensure the integrity of our findings. The results of the iSEC Partners
> audit are available here.

Callek,

He linked to a picture with a swiss army knife in it.

He did mean to link the picture (though it comes from Opera's desktop page).

I'll admit I'm interested in seeing the first head-on competition between anti-phishing in the released versions of IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera 9.1. After all, the current studies could only compare Firefox and IE without going into beta territory.

And rumor has it that the version of Safari that ships with the next Mac OS X release will also have anti-phishing capabilities.

Now that should be an interesting four-way battle!

All Asa did was state the factual

1) That Opera now had anti phishing protection

and

2) That it was months after Firefox and IE.

What part of that upsets Opera fanboys?

Well I guess it's things like:

"Only months behind"

Asa's mantra is that Opera always lags behind Firefox (despite 1.5 and 2.0 mostly catching up with features that have been available in Opera for ages).

Then again, judging by the number of responses, it looks like most Opera users have learned not to feed the troll :)

Anyway, if I am not mistaken, the first public test versions of Opera with phishing protection were available several months ago. So it's not like this is something that came out of the blue like Asa would have you believe.

Although Opera used it themselves, I've never liked that swiss army knife analogy. The Swiss Army Knife is a jack of all trades, master of none. But Opera doesn't compromise any feature functionality for sake of additional features. I've never seen, used, or otherwise been bothered by the mail or IRC or bittorrent in my day to day use. I've never felt incumbered by widgets. Voice control is (or used to be?) an additional download. But still- having used these all features, sometimes at the same time (when kickin' the wheels on a new release) I haven't felt the browser lag or drop to it's knees in mercy of doing too much.

To me- Opera is the toolbox that holds the indivdual knife, the scissors, leather awl (?), nail file, spoon, saw, magnifying glass, compass, tweezers, toothpick, and screwdriver. All in seperate drawers that... in some cases I've never looked in- but I know that if I need a pair of scissors, they will be there and fully functional.

...Oh- and the toolbox still manages to somehow be much lighter and smaller than any other single pocket knife I've ever picked up :)

Firefox is lagging behind with memory leaks from like years ago and no one complains. Do'h.

If you're all intent on picking apart his every word like vultures, I'd like to point out he compared it to the Swiss army, not the Swiss army knife. Bit of a difference ;)

ant- presumably that was directed towards me since I'm the only person who brought up the knife...but since you're so intent on picking my words apart like a vulture, who said I was talking about Asa's words? My first sentence started with "Although Opera used it themselves..."

...Because *Opera* has a pictures of a swiss army knife. They don't have a picture of the swiss army. Bit of a difference ;)

Hey lets all just have a huge nitpick gangbang!

LOL... I don't know what's sad (or funny): is it Asa's style of Opera news coverage? Or is it the 10-20 idiots who reply "Asa sucks, blah blah blah" 10 seconds later, predictably, boringly, mindlessly, like clockwork.

My personal opinion is that Opera sucks chunks. The only thing that Asa doesn't do enough is he doesn't criticize Opera enough and Asa is waaaaay to nice to Opera. What's up with all the factual correctness and politeness? Blah...

I never really liked Opera's GUI. It got better, but when it first came out, Opera's MDI was a dog to behold. In order to stay relevant, Opera made their browser free. Obviously they couldn't compete at the nominal fee they were charging for it. That tells me something -- it sucked. Because if there is a free product and your product is heads and shoulders above the free ones, people will pay. If people don't want to pay a nominal fee like 60 bucks (or whatever it cost), it can only mean one thing -- it sucked.

Let me say this again -- Opera sucks and will always continue sucking. Ahhh... that's great. I hope the idiots who take everything seriously burst a vein on this one.

More importantly: Wii is getting Opera.

don't forget OLPC (One laptop per child) runs opera..

man.. i'll never understand why people bash opera.. i can understand doing it when it was shareware but now it's just an awesome browser (notice i left out *another* browser) .. go ahead and bash internet explorer to your hearts content.. "Internet Explorer?? what the f*** is that!!!" haha

I've said before on this site that I'm a fan of both Opera and Firefox. But I do have to say that I prefer Firefox's anti-phishing feature to Opera's (though, truth be told, I never personally considered anti-phishing a to-die-for feature in any browser). Still, both browsers are terrific in their own ways. :P

OLPC... What's funny is that OLPC had to have more RAM installed to be able to run Firefox :D

If they had chosen Opera they could have made everything less expensive :)

It is interesting to get this kind of news from this source. Asa is the chairman of the community marketing effort to spread information and interest in Firefox. Firefox is about adding choice to the browser market. Opera does that too, but it's is not the goal of SpreadFirefox to spread information and interest in Opera. However, when someone points out that Opera now has anti-phishing like Firefox 2.0 and IE7, it means maybe some more people can check out Opera and possibly recommend it to less computer savvy people without worrying quite as much about phishing.

Having some commentary in there isn't so bad, as it's a blog, a place where you can feel free to voice your opinion. It's not Asa's job to like Opera as much as Firefox, and he can plant the seed of doubt if he so chooses. It's also not really his job to convert Opera users, so if they don't like his comments, that's tough. He's out to spread information about Firefox. This post just has little to do with that except a plug to promote Firefox's features.

Opera uses phishtank.com (from the people at opendns.com) for its fraud source. Didn't I read somewhere that firefox uses the same?

Opera uses phishtank.com (from the people at opendns.com) for its fraud source. Didn't I read somewhere that firefox uses the same?

Opera uses phishtank.com (from the people at opendns.com) for its fraud source. Didn't I read somewhere that firefox uses the same?

Sorry for the triple post. Was using my cell phone to send the comment.

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/81419

I don't use Opera and is not its fanboy by any means but really, Asa, these cheap shots at Opera are childish at best.

Make sure you get you invitations in early for next year: Asa's professionalism and respect to the real innovators in the industry get him invited to so many Christmas lunches/ dinners, and you wanna make sure you are first in line to be honoured with his presence.

A Christmas meal with Asa is an event NOT TO BE MISSED.

At first glance Opera's anti-phishing looks better than Fx's, since it includes a white list. If you are wondering if a site is going to steal your bank account, 80% protection from a black list seems like Russian roulette.

And I really hate to say this, but Mozilla's test may not make any converts, since MS is making a similar claim that their product is superior. I don't know what the reason is for the discrepancy. It could be that the blacklist service used in the MS test is not the same as used by Fx. Or it could be related to the freshness of the phish. The MS article claimed that they used really fresh phish.

At first glance Opera's anti-phishing looks better than Fx's, since it includes a white list. If you are wondering if a site is going to steal your bank account, 80% protection from a black list seems like Russian roulette.

And I really hate to say this, but Mozilla's test may not make any converts, since MS is making a similar claim that their product is superior. I don't know what the reason is for the discrepancy. It could be that the blacklist service used in the MS test is not the same as used by Fx. Or it could be related to the freshness of the phish. The MS article claimed that they used really fresh phish.

(By the way, folks, please don't bother replying with ad-hominem assumptions. You would be way off the mark. Thanks.)

Vanilla Mozilla, care to provide a link to Microsoft's evaluation and any third party audits of their methodology?

Also, Firefox's solution is both a whitelist and a blacklist.

- A

Are you _sure_ Fx checks against a white list? Here's the description I have:
"...Firefox 2 checks the websites visited by users against a
local list of URLs that are known phishing websites."
(from http://www.mozilla.org/security/iSECPartners_Phishing.pdf )

As I wrote, Opera specifically tells you if a site is on a white list. Fx, on the other hand, does not give you a positive indication that the site is OK. Not appearing on a black list is not a sure-fire indication of safety.

Here's a press release for the MS article:
http://www.3sharp.com/projects/antiphishing/
and here's the article:
http://www.3sharp.com/projects/antiphishing/gone-phishing.pdf .

I haven't seen any third-party audits of the methodology.

Here's the MS evaluation: http://www.3sharp.com/projects/antiphishing/gone-phishing.pdf . I don't know if there are any third-party audits.

Are you sure about the whitelist? Sure doesn't look like it from this: http://www.mozilla.org/security/iSECPartners_Phishing.pdf .