This may not be news to all of you but I think many will be pretty chocked. Certainly I was. It was noticed earlier on last year but nothing – at least on OS X version – has been done to fix it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

You know when you’re login on to a website for the first time, your browser asks if you want to save the password? I often choose to save the login credentials on sites that aren’t in the circle of ‘important to keep secure’ sites. After all, my laptop locks up every time it goes to sleep or screensaver comes on so it’s not THAT easy to get on it.

Firefox obviously does this, too. It’s convenient to use it. But what I didn’t know before is how easy it is to get those passwords, in plain text. Go to Firefox Preferences and select the ‘Security’ -tab (those were air quotes) there select Show Passwords. Unbelievable. Anyone, who has access to your computer for about 30 seconds without you watching, will be able to LOOK at your passwords and copy them. In the following video, I will demonstrate how this is done, in under 20 seconds:

Of course some websites don’t let you save the password, banking websites foremost. But the problem is that so many people recycle their password. Using the same password for banking and facebooking is not a good idea.

I haven’t been using Firefox for a while now but when I did, I used to recommend it to people. I don’t anymore.

–kristian

ps. Safari saves passwords, too, but it saves them in Keychain. Keychain database has AES 128 bit encryption on it making it not far from un-hackable. You can still access them, but you need to be authorized as the admin.

As I’d say in Finnish: “Nyt tuli mitta täyteen!” which roughly translates to:”My measure is now full”. It basicly means I’ve had enough.

-Since Firefox 2.0, you can’t do ‘two finger scroll’ on MacBooks when browser is playing a Quicktime video. It stalls and jerks down or up basicly making it un-usable for many seconds.

-About a month ago, Firefox crashed on me eight times in one day. It seems that they thought this might happen as they build in an automatic session saver.

-Every so often something goes wrong, it starts taking too much CPU time and it has to be restarted.

-It takes absolutely ages to launch for the first time after a restart or login.

For about a month I’ve been contemplating on switching to Safari or Camino. First I thought I’de wait for 10.5 and then give Safari another chance. But yesterday, again, I was struggling with it and switched to Camino. I’ll still definately try Safari 3.0 when it comes but as it’ll take while to arrive, it leaves me plenty of time to try Camino.

I’m going to miss the way Firefox handles RSS listing (I’ve started using Vienna, the open-source project, as my main RSS aggregator), some of its plugins and the way you can press Cmd+n to select a corresponding tab but those things alone are not enough to keep me in. Oh yes, and the predictive search bar, that’s really cool and well missed.

I’m not looking back until maybe Firefox 3.0. Maybe. I guess one problem with it is that it is only ever going to be as good as the Windows version and as a Mac user I expect applications to excel their Windows counterparts.

kristian