I have recently learned that Mozilla Corp. had made available the Alpha 8 version of their famous browser, Firefox 3. Naturally, I was very interested in the new features provided and how the next generation of the browsing technology would make my experience on the web better. My excitement instantly disappeared after reading the title of the article, but I kept on reading anyway, just to make sure I got a clear picture of what was really going on.

Enhanced security is cool, but what about the browsing experience? It appears that the next version of Firefox will rather turn into a malware detector than a browser and that it will supposedly make web browsing safer. I got all the details about plug-in injection through unsecured connections and demonstration sites made available along with information about the way Google will help us identify which sites are evil and which ones are good. Or safe, at least. I'm not going to go over all of this because it's some very uninteresting stuff and it's available all over the place anyway.

However, I will say that personally I couldn't care less about these features. Not because they are useless to me (or any system administrator for that matter), but because I use the right tool for the right job and like it this way. To keep it simple. For me the era of the "all-trade-jack" is over. If I ever need a malware scanner, I'll just go get one. And everyone else should do the same. I can't really understand Mozilla Corp.'s plan with these features. Malware is nothing new, tools to hamper it already exist for quite some time now and people dealing with malware already use them. So what gives?

I feel offended every time someone tells me how to think and what to do, especially without explaining why. I can already see the message: "This page was blocked because Firefox suspects it contains malicious code". Should I trust Google on this? Should I trust Firefox? I deal with a lot of false positives each day and maybe this is what really bothers me. Who can say what Google reports as being a malware site? Not Google, for sure. Maybe I'll just end up having one of the sites I manage being in their list of "untrusted sites" because I post an article about security issues and need to start crying a flood of e-mails to them to remove it. I could just ignore them, but then no one would visit my unsafe site.

People should have limitless freedom on the net. The only limits should be set by software and protocols. Just like spam. It exists because the SMTP protocol allows it to exist. If one can create malware, then he was allowed to create it, and the network protocols also allow him to spread it. If a PC gets infected, who holds the responsibility? This is a very touchy subject indeed. Protecting the innocent (ignorant) PC users is very good overall, but there are many technology-aware people in this world and the security features to be implemented in browsers (as well as many of the already available ones) are a complete and direct insult to their intelligence.

Most likely one will be able to turn off the malware feature. But just the same, it is very likely it will be on by default. I'll never choose a web browser because of its security features. I choose an anti-virus for that. The web browser has to load pages quickly, display any page correctly and offer an ergonomic experience to the user. I browse the net a lot every day and I feel that this next version of Firefox will be very frustrating to use, especially while searching for anything related to security.

Maybe everyone should start bundling stuff in their software so we get web servers that come with their own web browsers, malware scanners, proxy service, site management software, e-mail system with special mail client, voice recognition and Office suite, and a little blue smurf in the top corner smiling at us, saying: "Please, move the mouse to the left. No, too much, a little to the right. That's it.... Perfect! It's alright now, you can click!."