Uh-oh: Safari, IE flaws combine to put Windows at risk!

Stephen Withers
Monday, 02 June 2008 09:41

Opinion and Analysis

Presumably you'd want that setting to apply only to files downloaded automatically, not those received as a result of clicking on a link. Even that could be troublesome given some web coding practices such as download links that don't point to the file concerned, but to a "thanks for downloading" page that triggers the transfer.

Dhanjani proposed an "Ask me before downloading anything" setting. The trouble with that idea is that as I pointed out earlier, people just become accustomed to clicking OK. That's a problem that dates back to the command line days when systems would ask for confirmation of 'dangerous' commands.

Within a surprisingly short period users became accustomed to typing Enter-Y-Enter instead of Enter alone at the end of those commands. Every so often, you'd do that and then slap your forehead when you realised you'd mistyped the command.

I'm particularly keen to hear what you regard as the correct behaviour for a browser in this type of situation - but please, let's take the "Microsoft sucks" and "Apple sucks" comments as read and concentrate on the issue?