Web page file types (.pdf, .htm, .html)

First, it doesn't make much sense for a person to be sending you a file in any of these formats as an email attachment. Mostly people would post these files on the web and send you a link to view it there.

Are they safe? If you open them on your computer in the usual way, I understand that you will be just as safe as if you viewed them as a Web page. That means opening them in a Web browser (with Adobe Acrobat Reader in the case of pdf files.)

And, is it safe to view Web pages? In developing browsers and associated programs for the Web, much attention has gone into making sure that the programs "can't get out of their sandbox." That's so that people will be safe and will feel safe using them. I know that the capabilities of the browsers are changing faster than I can keep up with them, and, since I choose to view web pages widely, I choose to trust my browser. So I trust it to open files such as these as attachments.

It's important to pay attention to Internet Explorer on your computer even if you never use it. I have Netscape Navigator as the default browser on my computer. (Yes, various people tell me I'm crazy because IE is so much more powerful these days. But I mostly look at pages that don't need the extra power.) But Internet Explorer is also installed. A few times I have noticed something I do bringing up Internet Explorer even though I would have expected it to just use the default browser. I haven't kept track, but I suspect these are various Microsoft products. That doesn't particularly bother me, but it did suggest to me that I should pay some attention to the default settings on the IE browser. I did that, and found that lots of things were enabled that I didn't understand. So I went through and changed most of that. (Under "Tools" and then "Internet Options" and then "Security" and "Advanced".) Instead of having everything enabled, I changed most to "Prompt", so that I'll have a choice about each action individually. I can look at the context and see if I trust the page or not. No doubt some of that would be a hassle if I were using IE every day, but since I don't particularly intend to use it at all, this is exactly what I want.

Many of our computers have many Microsoft programs on them. Microsoft has put a high priority on interactivity among their programs. That means that there is a lot of automatic opening of programs. I do understand the convenience of that, but I also recognize the price of that convenience is some loss of control.

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Last updated January 21, 2001. Mary Parker