Re: [tlug] Browser blues

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:

>>[LS quote] In the meantime, I've checked the settings under Mozilla (I use both
>>Mozilla and Firefox simultaneously...),
>>    
>>
>[snip]
>As a fellow Mozilla / Firefox "dual-booter", how did you get around
>the fact that running 'mozilla' (/usr/bin/mozilla on my machine)
>starts up Firefox (or vice-versa, depending on which you installed
>last)? I run /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin, but is there a better way?
>Or has SuSE (IIRC, you use SuSE, right?) solved that problem. Gentoo
>has a little tool that is supposed to fix it:
>  
>

I'm red-faced and embarrassed to give you the answer to that - as it 
exposes what a bloody idiot I am regarding the way I installed Firefox.  
When I originally downloaded Firefox, I put it in a user folder I have 
for software downloads.  After uncompressing it and saving the opened 
version in a folder (uncompress? decompress?  What's the correct 
terminology?), I attempted to install it and found instead that it fired 
up and was running from that location!  So... lazy and stupid bugger 
that I am, I just kept using it from there!  In the case of Mozilla (I 
was going to skip this part, but I decided I better give you the whole 
picture), I created a new folder for it - but again under user.  This is 
totally the wrong way of doing things I realize, but allow me to ask a 
couple of questions regarding this setup:

1) Security-wise, is it more or less safe to have the browser installed 
in a user folder?  I know that this method means the installation is 
only usable by that one user, but that's not a problem on the machine I 
set up that way as I (nearly) always operate the computer as the same 
user.  At the time I set it up, I ignorantly reasoned that if the 
browser was set up under the user, that the vital program stuff 
accessible under root would be further away and thus safer from attack.  
As time goes by however, I have begun to suspect (without knowing why) 
that the opposite may be the case.

2) After upgrading from SuSE 9.0 to SuSE 9.1, I began to have a problem 
where Firefox would just vaporize from time to time... no error message, 
no warning, no lock-up, it would just be there one second and gone the 
next!  I fixed this by going into Yast and installing Firefox 
system-wide from there, but I'm still activating and using the odd-ball 
setup I describe above.

So, my installation of both Mozilla and Firefox is totally unscientific 
and sloppy, but they do seem to run totally independent from one 
another, as well they might I suppose, being that they are not installed 
correctly, but are running from independent folders under user......

For security reasons, should I overhaul this setup?

>See RFC 2616, [1] section 13.2:
>  
>

Please forgive my extreme ignorance, but I don't understand what "RFC 
2616" is.  Is this part of the "man pages" I've heard of but been too 
embarrassed to ask about?

Thanks for you help, and I swear I'll be able to provide some more 
meaningful contribution to the list over time.