Indicium wrote:

> After starting IE8 (WinXP SP3) in the "No Add-ons mode" Gmail worked fine. I
> investigated the problem more in-depth.
>
> Currently I have McAfee SiteAdvisor and Finjan SecureBrowsing from Finjan
> Inc. After I started IE8 normally (i.e. with Add-ons) and disabled Finjan
> SecureBrowsing Gmail loaded normally.
>
> Thank you very much for the answer(s). Keep up with the good work!
>
> Kind regards.

I didn't care for McAfee's SiteAdvisor. Many of the ratings by McAfee
were too old. Sites change often. Also, the users that were voting to
SiteAdvisor were obviously not the professional types that you would
want voting. Many hadn't a clue how to vote or were using SiteAdvisor
as an opinion study rather than accurately noting malicious content or
behavior by those sites.

WOT (Web Of Trust) was a little better in that their ratings seemed
overall a bit newer or fresher than SiteAdvisor's rankings. Yet both of
these products would show no rating for the vast majority of sites that
I visit. At best, and according to their own statistics, they have
rated perhaps all of 5% of the web sites that exist. Ratings for
well-known sites was of no value to me. Ratings for sites that I would
already know that I would not visit were also of no value. Plus both of
these add-ons did cause stability problems. Not bad but an occasional
crash.

Finjan's toolbar is a bit different. Rather than rely on old ratings
and a boob-base of user voting, they check the web page on-the-fly.
Okay, but the free version only shows their test results in a search
output, like from Google. You have to pay to have it test pages as you
actually visit them yourself. Overall, the only sites on which it
alerted were those that use dynamically obfuscated code to hide their
content. The presumption is that they are hiding the content or varying
it to thwart hash signatures to identify some of its content because
they have malicious content. However, many of the sites alerted by
Finjan for dynamically obfuscated code were merely using it to thwart
web crawlers or users from stealing their content. I didn't find it of
much value to warn me a site was "bad", and to only warn me from a
search engine's output wasn't that protective, anyway.