Microsoft Says IE ‘Secure As Any Other Browser’
Then how is it that a colleague here at the office using IE got whacked with a piece of trojan code while surfing a web site and I, using Firefox, didn’t? Good try, Microsoft, but those of us who know what we’re talking about know better. IE’s got holes big enough to drive FedEx’s whole truck fleet through and the “speed” at which MS fixes those holes is the laughing stock of the industry. A report on CNET quotes Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director, and Ben English, Microsoft’s security and management product manager talking about Firefox and its features. One of the passages in that report is especially noteworthy:
| :::::::: | “I don’t agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important,” he said. “It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.
“If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that.” English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users. “I don’t believe it is a true statement that IE doesn’t have the features that our customers want,” he said. “We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team.” |
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Interesting statements to make, considering they haven’t installed or used the software they’re scoffing at. If you haven’t used tabbed browsing, you’ll be hooked after the first time you get to try it. The ability to open links on a page you’re viewing into another tab in the same window and not interrupt what you’re already looking at is priceless. The bookmarks can be grouped in ways that allow you to open up a brace of pages you find you always use – for example, the home pages of a number of on-line news services – all at once in different tabs. That feature alone was enough for me to download Firefox but the enhanced security is a bigger deal. Is Firefox perfect? Hardly. And there have been instances of vulnerabilities found in the code. Fixes for these holes have generally been available within a matter of a few days or even hours. Microsoft took 6 months to close one of their holes.
Go have a look and see for yourself.
