Andy Chase

An infected e-mail message and web server (I'm assuming they were running Microsoft IIS) tried to send me the "Happytime Worm" virus at work today, and thankfully my anti-virus software caught it. I have no idea what it does, but I do know that it exploits a big ol' Microsoft Internet Explorer security hole of some kind, since the virus was contained in an inexplicably hidden .VBS (Visual Basic Script) file.

For whatever reason, it looks like the good folks up in Redmond decided that what you probably want to do with a hidden, client-side executable script from an utter stranger is execute it automatically.

Mozilla doesn't pull stuff like that... you can configure Mozilla to prompt you to download images if you want to, and it would never execute anything without asking you what to do with it first.

And the Gecko rendering engine really does run circles around Netscrap 4.x, so don't let the "classic" skin fool you. It's a much better browser than NS 4.x ever was.