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Friday, December 22, 2006

Is This A Feature Or A Bug? - Updated

Hi Visitors,

This post contains additional information about one of my previous post "Is This A Feature Or A Bug?”. The finding in that post "In IE if a web page is added to favorites, Then it is possible to browse that page by giving the name we saved that page" puzzled me a lot and made me ask you “Is this a feature or a bug?”. If you want to understand more about that feature (or bug) please read that post also.

Now you may ask me "What is the need for this post?”, “What do you mean by Updated?" Yes, I am coming to it. It is another finding about that feature (or bug). And it is "In IE it is possible to browse folders and files saved in the desktop by just giving their names in address bar".

EG:-
Create a folder in your desktop and name it as “http://www.google.com/”.

Open IE and give the name of that folder in address bar “http://www.google.com/”.

IE will open the folder “http://www.google.com/”.

As in my previous post on the similar feature (or bug) I am writing down advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:
I don’t find any advantages. Because it is easy to open a folder in the desktop by just double clicking it rather than opening IE and typing the folder name. Actually it don’t make folder browsing easy.

Disadvantages:
It is similar to the disadvantages of my previous post. In a public internet cafe some one creates a folder or a file in desktop by the name of some webpage (Eg-www.google.com). And if some other guys came here to browse and he gives a web address (Eg-www.google.com) and if it is taking him to some folders or files, then he do not know or care for the reason, he will switch to some other browsers

Further Investigation:
I verified all other browsers (Firefox 2.0, Mozilla 1.7.13, SeaMonkey 1.0.6, Netscape 7.1 and 8.0) to check do they have the similar feature(or bug) or not. And they don’t have such feature (or bug).

I haven’t heard of this feature (or bug) before so I checked IE documentation, Microsoft online support documentation and googled the net. And I failed to find details about this feature (or bug) any where.

Conclusion:
This Conclusion is also same as my previous conclusion. This is a bug rather than a feature. Please do post your suggestions also.

Note of Thanks:
I really like to thank James Bach (Great Tester who inspired me through his blog) for leaving a comment in my previous post "Is This A Feature Or A Bug?". Thank you Mr. James, that comment inspired me a lot. Comment from great testers like you will really rejuvenate newbie testers like me. Once again Thanks.

Thanks
Nishanth Balachandran

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,

This is not a Bug. I woulkd say this is feature. If you type an address in IE and press enter, first it will check if there are files in the current directory. If so it will display them, otherwise it will display actual site if it exists

Madhivanan
http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/madhivanan

Nishanth Balachandran said...

On Madhivanan's Comment

Thanks for your comment. But I Still believe that this is a bug rather than a feature. My reasons are:

IE is not only checking its current directory but also some other directories as well. It is checking the root folder "Desktop" then its checking "My Computer" and at last it checks "Favorites" also.

But when considering other browsers like Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla they don't have such behavior. They are not checking their current directories even. It is possible to browse a file or a folder only if we give the full path in the address bar.

Because of this reason I doubted that this feature in IE is not a feature but a "BUG". I believe this is a clear security problem.

Thanks

Nishanth Balachandran