Week in review: Browser mania

Week in review: Browser Mania

Browsers are all the rage at the moment.

On the 16th came the news that IBM is now encouraging its employees to use Firefox as their default browser (currently some 10 percent of IBM employees do so).

hen, the following day, came this report on Microsoft's announcement that the upcoming version of its Internet Explorer (IE) browser would include tabbed browsing -- a popular feature of both the Firefox and Opera browsers.

Finally, there came the news that Netscape version 8 was about to be released (sporting features quite different from those in the beta version that has been out since March). But when it finally launched, the browser contained a host of vulnerabilities.

In security news, this week saw the outbreak of a "hate-spam" variant of the Sober virus. Then, almost immediately, the virus went into "hibernation" -- as directed by the virus writers.

And the final security scare of the week came from Intel. A 23-year-old PhD student from Vancouver has found that technology in Intel's Pentium 4 processors might allow hackers to steal passwords by reading "footprints" in its cache.