Mozilla 1.6.b

[Leo J Mauler]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 11:00:54 -0600 Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:
> Anybody install the new Mozilla yet?  Heard of any issues?  
> Mandrake is still stuck at 1.4, I think I may do a manual 
> upgrade.

I stopped at Mozilla 1.2.1 because it still had the option of denying
*all* scripts the ability of opening unrequested popup windows.

>From (as far as I know) Mozilla 1.3 onwards, the new "unrequested
windows" policy was "Allow All, Deny Some".  In other words, allow all of
them, deny only the ones you know are spam.  Since this means you have to
be spammed and waste bandwidth loading a popup *before* you can deny it,
it means hours of work for you, especially now that spammers are using
randomized URLs.

Now, when I first saw that policy, I thought, "gee, there must not be any
real network administrators working on Mozilla".  After all, one of the
first security things you do to a network is implement "Deny All, Allow
Some" policies about who gets into your network.  Network Admins who
implement "Allow All, Deny Some" are just asking to be hacked and used as
a spam relay (or worse).

My second thought was "gee, everyone on the Mozilla project must not use
Internet E-mail."  Internet E-mail SPAM filters suffer from the "Allow
All, Deny Some" problem, and anyone who has had to deal with SPAM would
implement a "Deny All, Allow Some" solution if they could
(challenge-response being my favorite, though I can't figure out one that
would work for a *blind* person.../and/ a *deaf* person simultaneously).

Naturally, most folks working on an OSS project can't do "deny all, allow
some" on their project email boxes, it would block out too many bug
reports along with the spammers.  But they *can* do it with their web
browser.

Yes, sometimes your banking website needs to open unrequested windows. 
My bank does.  And when you go to that site in Mozilla 1.2.1, you
*temporarily* check the box that allows scripts to "open unrequested
windows".  And then you uncheck it when you're done banking.

Mozilla version 1.0 was the answer to my prayer for a popup stopper for
Linux, and one which had a reasonable approach to stopping them: instead
of using up your bandwidth loading the popup window then closing it
(traditional popup stopper), don't load the popup window in the first
place.  Mozilla 1.3 took that power away from me.  And so I stuck with
Mozilla 1.2.1.

So does Mozilla 1.6 finally get back to a more *reasonable* "Deny All,
Allow Some" approach to allowing scripts to open unrequested windows?  Or
have they stuck with the stupid 1.3 and above "Allow All Popups, Deny
*Only* Those Popups You Have Already Been Spammed By" approach?

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