"One thing is certain, and is unlikely to be news that's welcomed at Facebook HQ. There is a growing perception out there that Facebook isn't the safest of places to be," wrote Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley in a recent blog post.
Some of the key threats recently highlighted by Sophos are rogue applications or survey scams that pop up from users' own Facebook friends who have been tricked into clicking on an interesting looking news headline or YouTube video that then duplicates to everyone in their friend's list. It then directs them to click on a website or survey, or inadvertently download malware.
One of the offenders now doing the rounds is a fake application that promises to let you see who has been viewing your profile.
Its focus on running applications within the browser is an important driver of interest in cloud computing, where applications live somewhere off on the Internet and are delivered by the browser.
The focus of future browsers will shift from "going places" to "doing things." This will be a boon to free operating systems, which will increasingly be able to hide themselves under the browser user interface. While Windows and Mac OSX won't go away overnight, the pressure on them will be to innovate beyond the browser, perhaps through a common set of extensions for HTML5 applications to use.