Browser Makers Band Together Against Phishers - Yahoo! News: Developers speaking for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror met in Toronto last week to hash over ideas on how their browsers could better identify trusted and suspicious Web sites. Additionally, they talked about changes to browser pop-ups that would make it more difficult for scammers to spoof sites or trick users into divulging personal information such as bank or credit card account numbers and passwords.

Alternatively people worried about phishing could just use Opera, which already gives you a one-click method to restore the chrome! :) Seriously though, it's good news for the industry that the major players can have a sit-down and work this sort of stuff out in a coordinated manner. Particularly good that Microsoft are putting aside their usual attitude and accepting that their product is not the only one in the market.

That said... I hope they're thorough in their actual implementation of these ideas. For example, having different colours to indicate levels of security is less than ideal. You shouldn't use colour alone to indicate meaning, so they'll need to add a text equivalent. It also means that if anyone figures out a way to hack the colour system the user could be hit twice as hard since they'll trust the site.

Really though, that's just details. The big point is to see the vendors putting the users first and working together towards an extremely important goal. Maybe next time they could talk about coordinated rendering standards :)

For more information, check out the posts from the various people involved:

Tags: , , , , .