What are different kind of browser bugs?

It is a universal fact that every thing in this world is infected with some discrepancies. So does it hold well for the web browsers! This article is here to discuss about the bugs associated with the web browsers.

Till date so many bugs of the web browsers like Mozilla, internet explorer, Netscape, opera and so on have been discovered. Let us check out some of the prominent errors:

Multiple browsers bugs

Bugs discovered under this category are:

(a) Font variant ligatures are not implemented by most of the bugs. The font module level 3 of the CSS defines the property of the font variant ligatures to specify the use of ligatures. Till now no such browser has been developed that supports this property fully.

(b) Font weight is not implemented consistently by the browsers. This font weight property of CSS lays down the specifications regarding the numeric values and key words.

(c) Data tables are not managed properly by the browsers. Most of the table properties are not supported by the browsers.

(d) Layout affected by outlining property.

(e) Styling legend tags

(f) Bugs in Mozilla Firefox
Styling is not applied and problems have been experienced with the horizontal scroll bar.

(g) Bugs in Internet Explorer
When the cursor is hovered over some elements, they did not work properly with the forms; the left origin of the positioning coordinates is incorrectly set.

(h) Bugs in Opera
&rsquo and &isquo entities were not recognizable by the opera, but this was later fixed in the 8th version.

(i) Bugs in Safari
These crashes were reported when : hover :: after was used.

(j) The borders separating the head and the body sections are often placed incorrectly by the opera.

(k) Multi-column ordered list remembering.

(l) Backgrounds show through invisible tables.

(m) Buttons with images cannot be aligned with those having only text.

(n) In some browsers even the fixed elements align along with the adjacent elements.

WHAT CHALLENGES ARE FACED WHILE DEVELOPING A WEBSITE

- When you start developing or designing your web sites choose carefully between the CSS and HTML.

- Don’t go for such an advance version of the languages because if you did then you may run in to the problems with the incompatibility of the browser.

- There is so much of competition going around the whole software market.

- The browser developers are releasing new browsers at very fast pace without even testing them properly which then becomes a headache for the web site designers.

- The new languages being used today like HTML 5 and CSS 3 are now gaining very much popularity though they are pretty much complex then their preceding versions.

- Number of features to be implemented is quite huge which is the major cause of the bugs.

- Whenever you come across a bug, do not forget to report it since it may be so very rare that nobody else would have stumbled up on it.

- One thing you should always remember is to keep the problem in the reduced form as much as possible.

- For doing this you an simply make up a copy of the code and from that remove the java script or CSS files one by one and ultimately you’ll come at a point when the problem will go away.

- Now you add that file and remove the others from the ones that you did previously.

- If you find that the bug is now going away even after removing all the files then it is likely that the bug lies in HTML coding.

- Now after you know that which aspect houses the problem, you need to locate that file or code.

What is meant by content spoofing in detail?

Content spoofing is a rarely discussed topic and is much unheard by the many of us!
So let's evaluate the concepts of content spoofing in detail:

- Content spoofing has been categorized as an attack technique using which the attacker is able to inject a malicious code or payload in to the good content of a web site or a web application.

- This malicious payload or code is later thought of as being the legitimate content of that particular web site or web application which is a wrong interpretation.

- Content spoofing affects usually the web pages which have been built dynamically.

- Text only content spoofing is the technique in which the payload usually as text is passed in to the body of the web page or application in the form of a query string value.

- This approach usually takes effect on the pages of the web sites displaying some news entries and error pages.

- Such content is then later posted on the web site as its legitimate content.

- So when the users visit that particular link they perceive that the spoofed content is nothing but the legitimate content.

- In some cases it is possible that the pay load may exist on the web page for a longer time than estimated.

- Most of the web pages have been built dynamically with the sources from the HTML (hyper text mark up language).

- The attacker can easily change the content and when the particular web page is accessed by a browser, the location comes of the same domain as the user expected but the user does not come to know that the content is not legitimate instead it is shrouded one.

- As this is not enough to harm a web site, some attackers even manage to send malicious links to the users through emails and messages.

- In some cases the malicious links can be enforced up on the users following a cross site scripting attack.

- When the user clicks that link, he/ she visits the web page designed by the attacker with the malicious URL (uniform resource locator).

- The user will not come to know about this that he/ she is actually viewing am unauthentic web page.

- They will unknowingly believe that the spoofed content that they are viewing is purely authentic but this is not the case.

- Content spoofing does nothing but spoils the trust that the user has on the web site.

- The technique of content spoofing is being used like anything for the creation of fake web sites including fake login pages, press releases and defacement.

- Another point to be noted is that if you can fall victim to a cross site scripting attack, then the chances are that you may fall prey to content spoofing attacks as well.

- Content spoofing is a type of exploitation activity used by the hackers who have wrong intentions like presenting certain web pages to the user as if they are legitimate and not from an external source.

- This is somewhat similar to the SQL injection attacks. In both the cases the victims are defrauded like in phishing.

- Some attackers can even access the data base of a web application stored in a server and alter the contents.

- Content spoofing cannot be readily detected since there is large apparent difference between the actual and the spoofed content.

- The content spoofing carried out with the help of dynamic hyper text mark up language or DHTML is considered to be the most dangerous type since it can be used to form fake login pages.

- When any user inputs his sensitive data (can be a password, credit card number etc) in that page, the data goes directly to the attacker without the knowledge of the user that he has fallen victim to an identity theft.

Data Formats

The data bits in a serial transmission may represent anything, including commands, sensor readings, status information, error codes, or text messages. The information may be encoded as binary or text data.

- Binary Data : The receiver interprets a received byte as a binary number with a value from 0 to 255. The bits are numbered 0 through 7, with each bit representing the bit's value (0 or 1) multiplied by a power of 2. A byte of 1111 1111 translates to 255 or FFh and 0001 0001 translates to 17 or 11h. In asynchronous mode, bit 0, the least-significant bit arrives first. Binary data works fine for many links but some links need to send messages or files containing text.

- Text Data : To send text, the program uses a code that assigns a numeric value to each text character. There are several coding conventions :
* ASCII : It consists of 128 codes and requires only seven data bits. An eighth bit, if used, may be 0 or a parity bit.
* ANSI : It consists of 256 codes with the higher codes representing special and accented characters.
Other formats use 16 bits per character, which allows 65,536 different characters.

One can also use text to transfer binary data by expressing the data in ASCII Hex format. Each byte is represented by a pair of ASCII codes that represent the byte's two hexadecimal characters. This format can represent any value using only the ASCII codes 30h through 39h (from 0 through 9) and 41h to 46h (for A through F).