In a perfect world the internet would always be free, fast and void of spam, malware, spyware and the like. Things being the way they are, however, the internet is a potentially dangerous place.
You don’t want your computer wandering, unsuspecting through the untamed internet landscape, after all. It could catch a serious virus, or even worse, relinquish your vital data to some nefarious web bandit.
We take precautions to try and keep our various PCs, laptops, Macs and so on safe from the nasty things lurking in the web. We load it with anti-virus this and scan it for anti-malware that.
We know a few basic tips for staying safe we like to pass along. For instance we know the African prince who needs help getting his millions of dollars is a scam. We’ve even heard of Snopes.com which has proved useful when trying to weed through countless forwards and discerning fact from urban legend.
But did you realize sometimes the problem is your browser? It hardly makes sense that during these times of high competition between web browsers that any of them would fall in with the sorts of companies and individuals who (shudder) spam our in-boxes. And yet, that’s what can happen.
Take WeatherBug, for instance. When this neat little widget first showed up everyone and their mother had it blipping away the local weather in the corner of their desktop. It was, after all, pretty neat to get the current weather and a short forecast at a glance.
But things sort of fell apart when people starting realizing WeatherBug was a spyware distributor. And WeatherBug is a recommended Add-on at Mozilla.com, just going to show you can’t always trust a company to do the right or the smart thing. While it doesn’t make Firefox any less of a great browser, it’s important make sure you know what you are agreeing to when adding an add-on.
