Did the BugBlog help you? Donate via PayPal to say thanks.

Even better, subscribe to the BugBlog Plus for even more coverage of bugs and their fixes.

Order books and more at Amazon.com

Order Windows 2000 Secrets from Amazon.com

BugBlog Bug of the Month

Starting with January 2005, the BugBlog will pick its Bug of the Month, representing the most significant bug found in the past month. Sometimes, the bug will be the one which could potentially cause the most damage; sometimes it will be the bug which affects the most users. And sometimes, it will be the bug that is just the most interesting bug. This bug will be selected either from the free Bug of the Day, or from the subscription-only BugBlog Plus.

The Bug of the Month for June 2005 was posted as the Bug of the Day on May 21.

AOL has released Netscape 8.0, which is a combination of both the Mozilla Firefox and the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. They almost immediately then released the 8.01 update to incorporate the security fixes in the Mozilla Firefox 1.04 release. (Most of the security bulletins that you find at the Netscape Security Center at http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/security/alerts.jsp are actually links to Mozilla security bulletins.) Some of the security in the Netscape browser is based on a Trust Rating System, explained at http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/security/default.jsp. (Can't say that the security zone model has worked well for MSIE.)

Why this one? If nothing else, for the sheer ineptness of the AOL developers, who seemed to be clueless about what had been fixed in Mozilla Firefox. The blamed the oversight on a "consultant"; maybe if they had a subscription to the BugBlog, they would have known about Firefox 1.04. The other reason for picking this bug, was that there was an additional problem less than a week later.

A new bug has surfaced in the newly-released AOL Netscape 8. It appears that installing Netscape 8 will cause some problems with Microsoft Internet Explorer on pages that call for XML rendering. Apparently, Netscape edits IE's portion of the Registry for its own use, which causes the problem. Microsoft has suggested a remedy for this -- uninstall Netscape and then make some edits to your Registry. This fix hasn't shown up yet in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but is in the semi-official IEBlog that is run by the Microsoft Internet Explorer developers at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/25/421763.aspx. AOL says you don't have to uninstall -- just wait for their fix.

I just checked, and it doesn't look like they've released the fix yet, for they are still offering Netscape 8.01.

Previous Bugs of the Month

May 2005: TCP/IP Fix for Windows

April 2005: Denial of Service against Symantec Norton AntiVirus

March 2005: IDN Spoofing Bug

February 2005: Windows Animated Cursor Bug

January 2005: Windows Firewall Problems with Dial-up connections

The Bug of the Month is also posted at Blogcritics.org