Is IE8 really so bad?
I'm assuming this is a tongue in cheek comment.
If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#22Current 0-day or no, you'll be doing much more good in the long run if you replace the pre-installed acrobat reader with a 3rd party viewer.
It's not even preinstalled, so it shouldn't be that difficult. Foxit and Sumatra PDF are both great choices.
It's quite easy either way... but if we're talking about systems that are vulnerable to this ie flaw the chances of it having shipped with acrobat pre-installed are like 99%.
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#23As a developer who's deeply tied into web technologies, I cannot help but grin at this post. Unfortunately, I know where this is going to lead, however. My mother visits a site that embeds WMV-based videos for her Russian TV shows. It was not until she purchased a new MacBook that I realized that this was the site she visits 90% of the time she's on the Internet. I thought installing Flip4Mac would solve her crisis,…
You can install Windows XP on a Macbook.
I know it sounds crazy, but I've found teaching my mother to use VMWare had an easier learning curve than BootCamp.
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#24Current 0-day or no, you'll be doing much more good in the long run if you replace the pre-installed acrobat reader with a 3rd party viewer.
This is really good advice - Adobe's reader is a performance destroyer. Foxit is getting bogged down with features but Sumatra [1] is simple and super fast.
[1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#251. Remove all shortcuts to Internet explorer from the start menu, mydocuments, desktop, and search menus.
2. Install latest version of firefox, use IE themes.
3. Make a shortcut to start firefox, but change the icon to internet explorer, the retarded blue 'e' symbol.
4. Make sure you get all the bookmarks copied over.
5. Make sure any buttons, keys or special behavior moved to equal features on firefox.
6. Also put some firefox shortcut icons around the start menu and desktop.
They won't even notice anything is different, and if they do, tell them they had to radically update it so that it would be more secure and faster.
If they were tech savvy enough to notice what you were doing, they would have the skill to change it back, and most likely would be already using firefox.
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#26As a developer who's deeply tied into web technologies, I cannot help but grin at this post. Unfortunately, I know where this is going to lead, however. My mother visits a site that embeds WMV-based videos for her Russian TV shows. It was not until she purchased a new MacBook that I realized that this was the site she visits 90% of the time she's on the Internet. I thought installing Flip4Mac would solve her crisis,…
I suggest bootcamp/winxp native install, and just abandon the mac half of it.
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#27As a developer who's deeply tied into web technologies, I cannot help but grin at this post. Unfortunately, I know where this is going to lead, however. My mother visits a site that embeds WMV-based videos for her Russian TV shows. It was not until she purchased a new MacBook that I realized that this was the site she visits 90% of the time she's on the Internet. I thought installing Flip4Mac would solve her crisis,…
Flip4Mac isn't my idea of good Mac software. I have it installed on my Mac but basically, it um, isn't good.
I don't have any problem viewing WMVs and doing whatever with them on Linux. Is VNC or mplayer available for Mac OS?
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#28Current 0-day or no, you'll be doing much more good in the long run if you replace the pre-installed acrobat reader with a 3rd party viewer.
Just like IE, sometimes you have to use Adode Reader. I deliberately removed Acrobat from my mom's iMac and set Preview.app as the default. Worked fine for years until I got a call a few days ago about a PDF she needed to open to do some work. Sure enough, it was some sort of interactive PDF that only seemed to work with the Adobe Reader.
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#29Actually my parents are using a Debian box with Chromium. I found it is a lot easier to manage remotely than a Windows box; it's really low maintenance; they won't grab malware and the Gnome desktop can be really dumbed down - I only left the window switcher, shortcuts for chromium and skype on the panel and on the desktop, time and date, volume control.
Mine too. Same reasoning. She accepted Ubuntu 100%, which makes sense given it's not much of a different interface than Windows XP for the average user. She even missed it when it was gone for a week (I took her system home to do a fresh install, upgrading 8.04 to 10.04). Forced to use my father's netbook, she said she 'missed the Mozilla fox operating system'. I suppose that does show how much people are tuned into the browser as the main feature of the OS!
Re: If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.
#30Current 0-day or no, you'll be doing much more good in the long run if you replace the pre-installed acrobat reader with a 3rd party viewer.
It's not even preinstalled, so it shouldn't be that difficult. Foxit and Sumatra PDF are both great choices.
If they are a regular computer purchaser (i.e. buy from a manufacturer like hp, dell, etc.) it most certainly is preinstalled along with and old version of java and an old version of flash for their convenience.