p2pnet.net News:- “Internet Explorer is the Swiss Cheese of software – it’s full of holes. Holes in software are never good, but when the browser is so integrated with the OS as to be as one – you’ve got problems. Add to that the sheer ubiquity of the Microsoft browser, and it’s no wonder IE has become the hackers’ No.1 playground.”

Who says so? No less than the Redmond Magazine which bills itself as the Independent Voice of the Microsoft Community.

And it goes on:

“Now we’re beset by increasingly common – and dangerous – security vulnerabilities. We knew IE was integrated with Windows, but we didn’t have any idea how integrated it was. Even Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on IE’s internals, judging from the weeks it took to deliver an actual fix for the recent Download.Ject Trojan.”

That is not, of course, to say an integrated browser is all bad, says Don Jones who wrote the article.

To a developer, it’s cool because it gives you a built-in HTML rendering engine.

But, “the downside is a real downer. With a regular Web browser, a security vulnerability might let someone crash the browser. With an integrated Web browser they can crash the whole operating system. The tight ties to Windows means that the slightest IE security issue becomes an OS-wide panic. It’s not just IE, either: Windows Media Player, Outlook Express, and even DirectX, are all, in my opinion, overly integrated and give hackers too much access to core PC functions.”

Jones goes on to note two IE alternatives – Firefox and Opera – and also sights in on functional reasons to consider other browsers, such as tabbed browsing, “something you’ll love once you try” – built in in searching and pop-up blocking.

At the end of the day, “Alternative browsers may not offer perfection, but they offer plenty of features, though with less manageability. Their security is stronger at this point, but haven’t really been tested.

“At the very least, though, these browsers offer far less integration with the Windows operating system, making them far less likely to be an entry point for a severe, system-damaging attack.”

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See:-

Microsoft Community – Time to Dump IE?, Redmond Magazine, October, 2004

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