Microsoft Hates World of Warcraft

Ok so probably not really but they do run a pretty loose ship when it comes to web browser security.  That’s why I haven’t used IE as my main browser since sometime in 2005 when I discovered the joy of Mozilla Firefox.

As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since the vulnerability was discovered, he said.

"What we’ve seen from the exploit so far is it stealing game passwords, but it’s inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals," he said. "It’s just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs." – [Source]

While Firefox isn’t completely immune to security risks, it does offer many more ways to avoid running into trouble.  Now I know everyone has read plenty of articles about using Firefox with the Noscript plugin and keeping your antivirus up to date, but with the growth of Firefox’s popularity, it too will become a target for game password stealing hackers.

That is one of the reasons why I’ve switched over to using Google Chrome as my primary browser.  I say primary because I still have IE and Firefox for those occasions where they are just "needed".  Google Chrome has just now reached 1% market share as well (other sources show 3%).  To me that says "I’m too tiny to be targeted for security loopholes."  Doesn’t mean it won’t happen…just less likely.  Now I know you can never be too careful.  Not everyone wants to buy into using Google products as there are always tiny print clauses that you have to agree too in order to use their products.  But I drink the Kool aid.  So far Google’s products and services have been nothing but useful for me and Chrome is another fine example.  I like it so much I want to show you all today why I use it.

The first thing that got me excited about Chrome when I fired it up is the speed.  I’m not kidding, if you haven’t seen it in action take a look.  The web moves so much faster in Chrome because it uses a Multi-threaded approach to rendering your page.  Pictures, text, javascript…all loaded in different processes.  If you bring up your windows task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and look at the Processes tab, you are likely to see several instances of chrome.exe running.  That’s the multithreading working. So now when I’m opening up multiple Wowhead pages or reading ten or twelve wow blogs at a time each page loads super fast for me.

Another advantage of this multithreaded approach is that each tab is "sandboxed"  This allows Chrome to run applications in a restricted environments.  In simple terms its a huge hurtle for would be attackers because it prevents malware from being written to the hard drive.  You mean its a antivirus?  A spyware blocker?  Not exactly, and its not fool proof.  But is far more then the other current browsers offer today.  This is a definite plus for anyone who hasn’t been able to get a Blizzard Authenticator yet.  It also helps because if a tab starts behaving poorly, you can close that tab without the whole browser crashing.

Well those are nice but what else does it have for the World of Warcraft enthusiast? Shortcuts! The URL bar acts as a Google search page as well. I can use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+L, works on FF too) to move the curser to the bar and start typing in my search.  And if Google isn’t you favorite search engine you can specify others as well.  I can organize my bookmark bar by creating folders for categories and sorting my bookmarks in a way that is organized for me.  Then they simply act as a drop down menu keeping my favorite web sites close at hand.

One of the coolest features is how easy it is to customize your own search engine for web sites!  Just right click on the URL bar and go to "Edit search engines…"  From here you simply click Add and fill in its name, keyword (that you’ll be typing in to start the feature), and finally the search string with %s as the search token.  So my blog would look like this…

Name: I Sheep Things
Keyword: sheep
URL: http://www.isheepthings.com/blog/?s=%s

Now you simply hit Ctrl+L to go to the URL bar, type in sheep, hit Tab (to fire up custom search) and then type in your query.  This will instantly load my search page for the term you searched for.  One of the coolest parts of this is, Chrome will auto discover these on sites you frequent.  Here is a few handy URL search strings you might like to use:

• http://www.wowwiki.com/index.php?&search=%s
• http://www.wowhead.com/?search=%s
• http://thottbot.com/?s=%s
• http://www.wowdb.com/search.aspx?search_text=%s
• http://www.curse.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=%s
• http://twitter.com/%s    (See you can even add urls that are not really searches!)

So even though I am a fan of Chrome, there are some downsides.  It’s still beta.  There are bugs but I haven’t encountered much.  If you like to customize the look of your browser, you might hold off.  There is no real official skins/themes for Chrome yet.   You can find some workarounds on message boards but they involved too much editing of the core files for my taste.  Also addons and plugins are not officially supported yet.  Again, it all comes back to being in beta still.  Some aspects of the browser are just not plugin friendly yet.  Also it hasn’t officially released on Mac or Linux yet.  Fans have discovered how to make it work for Linux but it is not an official release so use at your own risk, and taking risks is not why I run Chrome.  If you think you can live with these faults…give Chrome a try and tell me what you think.  Worst case scenario you simply uninstall it and go back to your browser of choice!

**UPDATE**
as @acedanger pointed out Chrome went live and is no longer in beta.  Since Google Chrome updates automaticlly in the background for me…I haddn’t even noticed.  So even though its no longer in beta…it was a pretty good beta. @awlbiste also pointed out that gmail is still in beta and we all know how widely used and productive that product is.  Also, @justanna made mention of chromes current inability to dissable javascript.  I hope with Chrome being out of beta now we will start to see the ability to add extentions and themes.  Perhaps then we could look towards customizing the javascript options a bit more.

If you are a die hard Mozilla fan though and wish you could have the speed of chrome you might want to check out Firefox Minefield.  A word of caution though…this is in no way to be considered out of the testing phase.  It’s in ALPHA stage but it does have its own engine to which it promises to be Faster then Chrome and available for Linux and Mac users.