How do i enable activex on firefox install#
How do i enable activex on firefox update#
How do i enable activex on firefox Pc#
How do i enable activex on firefox windows#

How do i enable activex on firefox Pc#

I have never seen this actually used, and certainly there'll be another warning window appear before a script gains extra rights, but it kind of worries me that this is available to web pages at all.įor example an exploit through flash will gain access to my pc under my user rights There is another built-in way you can compromise yourself in Mozilla: signed scripts. Firefox's equivalent, XPInstall, behaves largely similarly, with the ‘information bar’ on all but Mozilla's sites by default and a suitable warning/prompt before installation.

How do i enable activex on firefox install#

The control-downloader part of ActiveX has also been cleaned up a bit since the bad old days when anything in the My Computer zone could install any software it liked, and aggressive loader scripts could trap you in an alert loop until you agreed to approve the ActiveX prompt. (As a side-issue, because many add-ons for Firefox are themselves written in JavaScript, a high-level scripting language, they are often more secure from buffer overflow and string handling errors than extensions for IE which are commonly written in C.)

Newer versions of IE have better controls for mitigating what sites are allowed to use what controls. Firefox is better off here as XPCOM is not shared with the rest of the system.

How do i enable activex on firefox windows#

Many other Windows features and applications that are nothing to do with web browsing use MS COM, and there have traditionally been endless problems where COM controls that were not written for secure web usage were nonetheless available to web pages. The object model of ActiveX is Microsoft COM Firefox's equivalent is XPCOM. Firefox has something similar-and cross-platform compatible, Ubuntu or other-for both. ‘ActiveX’ can be considered in two parts, the object model and the installation method. That is not 'easy'.ĭoes firefox under ubuntu has something similar to activeX, in terms of security vulnerability? For example, an exploit involving Adobe Flash will gain access to my PC using my user rights, and then proceed to exploit some known vulnerability in X to gain root access. When I say 'easy' I mean that the attack does not need to exploit another component of the system to elevate user rights. So the question again: does Firefox running under Ubuntu have something similar to ActiveX, in terms of security vulnerabilities?Īnother question which may be identical: can a security vulnerability involving Adobe Flash and/or JavaScript be 'easily' exploited to do as much damage as an ActiveX exploit? Of course that doesn't help much when the malware wants to destroy all of my data - but most malware today only wants to use my PC as a botnet drone and so is not interested in destroying my data. I know that there are many other security vulnerabilities that use JavaScript and/or Adobe Flash, but as far as I understand those kind of security vulnerabilities can only do as much damage as my user rights allow. Using Ubuntu and Firefox, I always feel so safe when reading about the ActiveX exploits.

How do i enable activex on firefox update#

(One reason might be that the name contains 'active' another might be the windows update function.) I read that so often I wonder why people bother to activate ActiveX at all. Every few days I read about another kind of exploit using ActiveX, and almost always the workaround is to deactivate ActiveX. One main security concern when using Windows and Internet Explorer seem to be ActiveX.

The main reason seems to be the general system design philosophy and the fact that users are users and not root. People always say that Linux is more secure than Windows.