Keep the Customer Confused

Keep the customer satisfied.
 - Paul Simon
Keep the customer confused.
 - Bill Gates

Get It Try It

Reading the comments at the Ars report on the latest IE vulnerability makes one's eyes water. They could just as well be commenting on open brain surgery, offering their astute advice. Here's some of the worst.

At some point, they're going to have to build IPS into Windows somehow.

Great idea. You sketch out the design, Microsoft will implement it. Great idea!

Staying on IE6 is proving to be very irresponsible. Hopefully it becomes expensive enough in terms of vulnerability that IT considers spending some money on entering this millennium.

So migrating to another browser will solve it? How will anything change when corporations can always pass these additional costs onto the consumers?

No specifics on which IE version, or whether DEP or protected mode have any mitigating effect?

Modded up for stupidity.

I also think MSFT needs to rewrite the code ENTIRELY from the ground up.

That's going to be difficult as they didn't write IE anyway. The IE code comes from Spyglass. It's not their code. They never wrote IE from the ground up.

How many debates have been had stating a lot of corporations would have to sink a lot of dollars into re-developing their IE6-only crapware in order to migrate to your free solution? Apparently not enough, since you missed them.

So the solution is to stay with a sinking ship? You missed something too - that the ship is sinking and that these costs will be incurred sooner or later, and that the longer you wait, the higher the costs will be. You missed a lot.

Just because you can upgrade in your personal life easily doesn't mean corporations can. They have a larger rock to push.

They might have a larger rock but they're corporations. They have to show greater responsibility.

Yeah, 19 is a smaller number of vulnerabilities found in Firefox 3.5 then the 11 found in IE 8.

It's the quality and the type of the exploits. FF doesn't go into the innards of a system - it brings all that along in its own backpack. IE goes into the innards of a system. So when IE goes down, the entire system starts to get funky.

I can think of countless times Safari has been used to take over a mac system.

O RLY? Tell us where we can read about them.

That latest spyware my parents got was installed through Firefox.

Your parents must be very stupid.

I thought Macs couldn't get hijacked that easily. I keep hearing how people barely ever get a Mac virus.

Somebody toss this rabble rouser out!

And you really have to use anti-virus and anti-malware software with any browser on Windows. I've even had reputable sites try to hijack the page, but in IE, not Firefox.

That's the point: AV and anti-malware protect a system, not a browser. That's where Microsoft fails - not in the browser but in the system.

MSFT doesn't always suck but I still think they need to redo IE code from the bottom up.

See above. You go ahead and contact the people at Spyglass and see if they still want to play ball.

Maybe with IE9, which I read was in early progress now.

Kool-Aid! Kool-Aid! Get your Kool-Aid!

any malware I've seen in the past 6 months has used social engineering to get an install

You must have been asleep most of the last half year.

See Also
Ars Technica: One day after latest fix, Microsoft investigate new IE flaw