At least according to Chapin Information Services, all your password are belong to us.  (That is to say, all web browsers fail at protecting your passwords.)

In their latest test of web browser password protection they ran Opera 9.62, Firefox 3.0.4, Internet Explorer 7.0, Safari 3.2, and Google Chrome 1.0.  And they all sucked.  Of the twenty one password tasks tested, Opera and Firefox (no surprises there at either) did the best, passing a whole seven tasks each.  That’s right, one third.  In school terms that would be 33%, which is a very right depressing solid F.

Oh, but it gets better.  Those were the best scorers.  From there we have Microsoft’s IE7 succeeding at a whole five of the twenty one tasks.

And then the real failures: Google Chrome and Apple Safari, only passing a mere two out of twenty one tasks.  Two.  Two!

(For more detailed information on which browser fails which task, visit http://www.info-svc.com/news/2008/12-12/.)

The moral of the story?  As you shop around online this Christmas season, really really really don’t trust your web browser, even the best of them, to protect your passwords.  Don’t let your browsers save your passwords.  You’ve got better security just writing the passwords on a Post-it and sticking it to your monitor than you are letting your web browser remember your passwords for you.

Okay, so I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox 3 for a couple of days now.  And’s here’s my basic impression: Mozilla is full of crap.

There are supposedly all sorts of new and improved features.  Safer?  Maybe, though I’ve never really had a problem with that in Firefox 2.  Smarter?  More annoying so far as I can tell.  It’s full of new bookmark features that I don’t want and wish there was a way to turn off.  The only thing smarter as far as I’m concerned are the new icons which look smarter, as in snazzier, not more intelligent.

But one thing that Firefox 3 most definitely is on my computer, is slower.  Everything I do is slower.  Not faster, like Mozilla claims, but slower. S - L - O - W - E - R.  Slower.

The most annoying thing of all is that now is that it’s so slow to close that when I close it and open a new session, I keep getting this error message:

And so I wait.  And try again.  And sometimes it eventually works.  And sometimes I have to wait more.  Eventually it finishes closing, and eventually I can open a new session.  But I’ve never even remotely had this problem with Firefox 2.  This is most assuredly a Firefox 3 “feature” to be this very slow to close.  The error simply is, Firefox 3 is slow.

(For those of you wondering why I do this, I have a  1920×1200 resolution.  I thought it would be nice to put some of my various web-mail and forum links on the desktop, grouped next to Mozilla Thunderbird, since I have so much unused real estate.  So as I check each, I close each one when I’m done and open the next.  Perhaps strange behavior, I know, but when you have more bookmarks than you know what to do with, you start looking for interesting new ways to make the important ones stand out from the general mish-mash.  It worked absolutely fine with Firefox 2.  But the “faster” Firefox 3 is so much slower that it no longer works so well.)

This is just one example.  As I said, everything in Firefox 3 seems to be slower.  Firefox 3 takes noticably longer to start up.  Pages take easily twice the time to load.  It’s like my hard drive got downgraded.  But it’s not my hard drive.  It’s Firefox 3.

And for what?  A bunch of gimmicky features that I’d rather remove.  What I’d rather have is a Firefox Lite.  If I want stupid features that make my browser crap I’ll use Internet Explorer, thanks.

Honestly, after “upgrading” to Firefox 3, I’m seriously considering switching to Opera.  Firefox 3 is just that bad.  (And no, I’m never going back to IE until Microsoft learns from their mistakes.  You do not force the menu bar to be the second bar from the top.  It’s the first.  It’s always the first.  And the GUI bloopers just get worse.  It’s like Microsoft forgot what a GUI is even there for, which is to be intuitive.)

My advice?  If you haven’t made the mistake of upgrading to Firefox 3 yet, then don’t.  Stick with Firefox 2.  It’s faster.  It’s just as functional.  And it’s not as cluttered with features.

So word is out. Firefox has officially hit its third version.

Chances are, either you already know it and love it. Or you don’t know it or for one reason or another deign to hate it.

Meh.

Such is life.

In case you don’t know, Firefox is yet another web browser. Like Internet Explorer. Like Opera. Like Safari. Is it any good? Well of course I think so. But as with all things, your mileage may vary.

Cherrypal, one of the new buzzwords kicking around the geek-o-centric blogosphere. But what is it?

Unfortunately, there’s not really a good answer for that. It’s … new.

And not.

Cryptic enough? Yeah, so is Cherrypal’s website.

But here’s the scoop based on what everyone is claiming:

It’s sort of a cross between a thin client and a PC. It has a dink-o-rinko 4GB internal flash drive. It runs on a teeny-tiny 400MHz Freescale mobileGT MPC5121e chip. It has a whole thimble full of 256MB of DDR memory. It runs on some tweaked version of embedded Linux, suggested to be Debian. As you can see from the back at least we can pretty much guarantee a whole whopping two USB ports, built-in ethernet (which being so thin of a client will desperately need), and the only video-out looks to be VGA. Crap-a-logue. No digital. And strangely no composite video to hook it up to any old TV.

Why the less-than-stellar specs? So that the (insert eco-friendly buzzword here) Cherrypal can run on a total of 2 watts. Yes, you read that right. Two whole watts. Nifty. But … err … why? To cash in on the latest trend in green-ness of course.

Oh, but it’s not easy being green. Thanks to that design it pretty much leaves the Cherrypal in the realm of thin client. Oh, they can try to sell you on otherwise. But honestly. What is going to really fit into that 4GB of internal space? The OS. Some pre-installed apps like web browser and email client. And maybe if you’re really really lucky you can squeeze in something like an x86 emulator to run iTunes or something. Maybe. Can you really squeeze all of your apps onto your local 4GB? Doubtfull.

You can pretty much guarantee that all of your “storage” is actually going to be some 40 to 80 odd gigabytes networked off of some distant Cherrypal company server, probably variable based on how much of a monthly fee you want to pay them. If you’re really lucky there might also be some weird remote execution design built in so that not only do you have non-local storage, but you have non-local processing power, and your Cherrypal is really a thin client. But that part could easily be a pipe dream. In which case, you’re screwed. Because with the Cherrypal’s built-in processing power you’ll just barely be able to run your web browser whenever a flash animation comes up. Or for that matter OpenOffice.

Games? If purely local processing is in play, then maybe on the level of solitaire, minesweeper, or pinball. Definitely not anything released for Windows, since it doesn’t run Windows. And even then definitely not anything that anyone would consider modern. You’re looking at the level of gaming a cell phone can do, not a modern PC. Tetris anyone?

All-in-all, this has been done before. As a home web-browser / email device. Maybe not quite this spectacularly, but then as time marches on, technology does improve. If the thin-client portion really does have remote executing power and your Cherrypall basically amounts to a video server to display what the remote execution does, then maybe it’ll have a prayer of being more than just yet another home web browser.

And while the 2 watt usage is impressive, that’s about the only thing. The rest, just bombs its way to hell.