Cracking Open Chrome

Fairly certain.

 

I agree, they really need to overhaul how they do things there. You can always use incognito mode I guess.

 

I'll be very surprised if we don't start seeing malicious extensions that try to install to your browser. Especially greasemonkey scripts, which will work for both Firefox and Chrome. Between the two of them there's quite a lot of market share and greasemonkey scripts aren't vetted like extensions.

 

Well since evidently nobody watches the gates, it could very well happen. Though I've used Greasemonkey maybe once, from what it does, it seems like it could be made to cause a lot of mischief.

 

I'm not sure how limited greasemonkey is but the fact that you can have a greasemonkey script in both Chrome and Firefox makes it very likely that you'll see them being exploited. It's like if OSX and Windows shared a common exploit, you'd see it used all the time.

 

Tossing this in:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/08/04/firefox-to-get-better-third-party-add-on-security/

 

Just wanted to report back to you Vasa, Peerblock makes for a terrible adblocker, don't bother. I'm assuming it works much differently than other adblocking methods as it made my surfing feel like I was swimming in molasses, and that was with HTTP enabled. It also left a godawful mess of "Firefox can't connect" messages everywhere on pages.

 

Yes, that's been my experience with hosts file stuff and also with blocking via firewalls when I would block with PCTools Firewall (free).

Content blockers (AdBlock Plus, Privoxy) send a sort of dummy message to the server (?) reassuring it that all is being loaded. Some pages hang if the don't get proper feedback. Sorry for the lack of professional terminology and any factual inaccuracies but this is only what I managed to understand from whatever I read and observed.