Feb. 2, 2005 - My in-laws, unknowingly and not by design, participated in an experiment over the past five years. When they bought their first PC in 1999, I hooked them up with Netscape for email and web browsing. Today, they are still running their PC without ever having to reinstall the operating system; I saw the W98 disk, it's still sealed, too. In those five years I never checked their PC for spyware and I never put a firewall on it. No firewall, I know, that's terrible but they were always on dial-up. They did use Norton Antivirus and, as far as I know, they've never had a virus. Well, now they are getting broadband this week so recently I went over to install a firewall and do the first ever spyware scan on their PC. Five years of not using I.E. resulted in this:

Ad-aware found 147 items, all data-miners; stuff like Coremetrics, et al.

Spybot found another 40 items, mostly cookies from the likes of Alexa, Hitbox, et al. They did have Comet Cursor which I'm guessing they downloaded themselves.

Nothing was found like CoolWebSearch, Webhancer, 180Solutions, or anything considered malware. Everything found was easily removed by Ad-Aware and Spybot.

Now, is this because they've been using Netscape (4.x and then later 6.2; now they are on Netscape 7.1) instead of I.E.? I would think, yes, this theory has some merit. Secondly, is this because Netscape is more secure than I.E. or because no one targets spyware for Netscape? People are quick to argue that I.E. gets all the spyware simply due to its ubiquity. However, we must remember that Netscape, at one time, had 90% of the browser market like I.E. has today. When Netscape was king, we didn't have spyware and malware taking over PC's. When Netscape was king, home broadband wasn't a reality for most people. Also, Netscape certainly wasn't entwined with the O.S. like I.E. is. Thirdly, my in-laws are not the kind of people who surf the web, see something "cool" (except maybe Comet Cursor) and download it. They are very conservative in their surfing habits. Maybe the lack of malware and only really a smattering of adware is a combination of cautious surfing, not using I.E., and not being on 24/7 with broadband. Now that they will have broadband I have explained to them to make sure the firewall is on and to scan for spyware at least once a week. Most importantly, I reiterated the point that they should stay clear of I.E. and O.E. They've been using Netscape for years and don't want to change anyway. I was smart to introduce them to the non-MS stuff from the beginning.

In short, the moral of the story is, as we all now, stay clear of I.E. A little education and starting someone off the right way can save a lot of trouble down the road.

I wonder if I can get them to try Linux once they decide to replace that PC.