Sibling rivalry part 2: the tubes

The internet isn't a safe place these days. With bot herds spewing spam across our beleaguered wires and a deluge of virii it's hard to imagine a time when you could connect your computer directly to the internet without any sort of protection.

free loving hippies.

While the times have changed, can we say the same about or operating systems?

it's not a truck

Finally Windows has a default web browser designed in this century. Previous versions of Internet Explorer were feature-stangnant, in part due to the market dominance experienced by Windows. Third party browsers like Firefox and Opera were better designed, with more features and frequent updates. Explorer was losing market share, something Microsoft was keeping a close eye on. Microsoft's latest, IE 7, parity has returned to the browser wars. Additionally the security implemented by Windows truly has a marked improvement over XP, which before SP1 didn't come with the firewall turned on by default. The inclusion of windows anti-virus from the very first boot gives Vista a decided advantage over its older brother.

Apple too has made several improvements to security. There was definite room for improvement. With Tiger, certain files that were downloaded were automatically opened upon completion. This led to several "Oh my there's a virus for macs!" instances that annoyed the more seasoned among us. When you try and run a program for the first time Leopard makes sure you were the one who downloaded it, a nice feature that didn't require the masses loitering at Cupertino to get. And unlike Vista, Leopard doesn't include any anti-virus software to protect the less security-minded of us out there. Nor are their efforts in the firewall panning out.

I mentioned earlier this week how Leopards new firewall can tinker with an application, thereby breaking its checksum. Most World of Warcraft players needn't worry because Apple doesn't turn it on by default. You might think they learned from Microsoft; turn it on by default. Even worse, there are reports that the firewall doesn't even work under certain configurations -- something a regular user isn't going to understand. Much less be able to fix it. I'm forced to admit Vista does a better job out of the box with security than Leopard.

Addendum:

Apparently the next update, 10.5.1 which is coming out in a few weeks, repairs some of these issues. Unfortunately Apple has lost some peoples faith in their firewall, and may now never turn it on. This oversight will cost us, Apple especially.