FARAWAY

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer, abbreviated MSIE), and commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. ( Wikipedia )

IE has been the most widely used browser since 1999, W3 Counter reported that on June 30 2007 the percentage of people that use IE in the world is 66.20 % comparing to 25.08 % for Mozilla Firefox.

The main question now is:
Is internet explorer safe for people to use ? Especially if you are checking your financial data or private emails ?

Lets start with Internet Explorer 6.
According to the washingtonpost in a report published by Brian Krebs IE was unsafe for 284 days in the year 2006, this means that for 78% of the time your computer was vulnerable to spywares, hacking and viruses (compared to Firefox’s 2% (9/365) ).
Further more for the same amount of time ( 284 days ) exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet, these exploits were highly used by hackers and criminals to steal personal and finnancial information from the user…
Mozilla firefox also experienced a smillar problem last year but it lasted only 9 days before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

Now that we are done with IE 6 lets see what IE 7 has to offer.
For the last couple of years developers at microsoft has been working on the long-awaited Internet Explorer 7, this much anticipated update to the software giant’s perennially security-challenged browser (At the 2005 annual RSA Conference, Bill Gates himself said, “Our primary goal is to improve security and safety for all our customers—consumers and businesses, regardless of size—through a balance of technology innovation, guidance, and industry leadership. . .We’re committed to continued innovation that addresses the threats of today and anticipates those that will undoubtedly emerge in the future.” ).

Indeed Windows Internet Explorer 7 is much better then Internet Explorer 6 ( IE 6’s security was so bad that it wasn’t hard to improve ). With its tabbed browsing (similar to firefox, mozilla and opera) and smooth look, the IE familly has improved a lot.

But still early signs shows that IE is still far behind Firefox.
In particular, after only 24 hours of its launch, the first security flow had already surfaced.

Another issue was discovered later: “Full disclosure” and Bugtraq postings. This problem is describe best by Michal Zalewski’s .He noted that the XMLHttpRequest object (used by many so-called “web 2.0″ applications) allows “client-side web scripts to send nearly arbitrary HTTP requests, and then freely analyze and manipulate the returned response, including HTTP headers. This gives an unprecedented level of control over your browser to the author of a visited site. For this reason, to prevent various types of abuse, XMLHttpRequest is restricted to interacting only with the site from where the script originated, based on protocol, port, and host name observed. Unfortunately, due to a programming error, Microsoft’s Msxml2.XMLHTTP ActiveX object that MSIE relies on allows you to bypass this restriction with the use of - BEHOLD - (newline-and-tab technology)
This kind of error was also made by Mozilla/Firefox people in 2005 !!! ( bug 297078 ) but it was fixed in the same year.

Now the problem here as i see it is not that Microsoft people made an error, the problem here is that they didn’t solve it.
Take for example the .png problem: it was a major bug in IE6 ( didn’t display correctly ), in IE7 the problem is not solved. Yes the .png now displays correctly but the window will freeze !!!!!

Finally I have 1 though for Microsoft: START LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS … Where did all the sent report go ? ? ?

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