(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
It looks like little by little the breaking of news announcing security flaws for multiple web browsers is just becoming more and more popular. From what I can see, and from what I have been able to weblog about throughout all this time, those security flaws are not longer applicable to just IE. Both Opera and FireFox are getting their share now and I must say that although I am not surprised about it I would think that is the price we would have to pay, all of us, end-users, for using popular browsers.
The last example has just been published a couple of days ago in the following article in Internetnews: Few Browsers Safe From Latest Spoofing Flaw and it details how this new flaw actually affects not only IE, Opera and FireFox but also Apple Safari. Secunia has even provided a test of the scenario where people can check if their browsers are vulnerable or not to this new exposure.
So I went ahead and test it out and indeed, Opera 8.01 fails to pass the test as suggested and therefore it is exposed. I haven’t bumped yet into any news if Opera will be addressing it or not but it looks like IE will not. It may be a bit too early, since it was just out in the open a couple of days ago, but I will be watching it out again and see how many of the most popular web browsers do actually bother to address the flaw and fix it.
As I have already mentioned elsewhere, in cases like this it is always down to the speed of execution that will get people to stick around with a product or just move on to the next one, hopefully, a much better one. So we will just have to wait and see what Opera will say about this and how long before the fix is available, if at all. The clock is ticking . . .
(Update): After having received comments from Louis over at subtitles and also from Daniel Goldman, over from OperaWatch I am updating this weblog entry to reflect that in fact Opera 8 actually fixed this security flaw the same day that it was made public ! Now *that* is what I call speed of execution ! Thanks ever so much to Louis and Daniel for correcting me in the wrong interpretation of my tests, which I carried out before posting the weblog and which I thought were incorrect but then it looks like they were actually right from the very beginning since Opera 8.01 fixed the issue right away. I really appreciate your feedback and input comments, folks! Thanks again for watching out there what is happening in this important and key area. I think next time I am going to double check a few times before I post something about it 😉
