"Microsoft warns on IE browser bug" - yes its called IE

The full story http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12067295

You can't condemn Microsoft for this. They have been good to announce this. Though how quickly will many companies will upgrade their browsers to something more secure.

Want a bet? All this time, all the trips round the patch merry go round and IE STILL isn't properly secure?


Because telling someone you've crashed their car is almost as good as not crashing it at all, isn't it?


They can't, that's the problem. There are millions of lines of HTML & javascript in intranet sites that are business critical that are tuned to IE.

The imperative is for MS to make IE secure. It always has been. It continues to be. Until they get it right.

Jon

I am not going to disagree, because yet it should be more secure. Though the more that people know it is insecure they will switch browsers. Though the problem is that many companies still run IE6 even when IE 8 is around and actually much better.

My office still has ie6 on their PC's.

How many software projects this complex have you worked on? How many of those are now bug free?

Also, look at the number of patches that OS X, Safari, iTunes, Linux, Firefox etc. get. They've all had similar numbers of round trips and still get monthly zero day flaws...


Telling somebody that the brakes could be dodgy under some circumstances is better than waiting until they hit a tree and then telling them...


It won't make any difference, IE6 has been out of security support for ages now, IE7 is due to go out of support next year.

That said, my last employer still had machines with Windows 95 on and we still have Windows 2000 machines running.

But a system designed to run on IE6 is long overdue for an upgrade to something more efficient and easier to use. I dug out an old Intranet app from my old employer, from 2001/2002. It is horrendous, I just ripped all the information out of it and put it into a new format that was easier to use and index... It took a couple of days, but it was time well invested, the information is much more usable.

My office barely runs without IE6

Certainly the majority of British government departments run on apps that will only work on IE6. Why simple M$ wrote the most non standards co0mplaint browser ever. There was virtually no option but use it the result is it will cost an arm and three legs to write everything to wok on standards compliant ( or nearly so ) browsers.

The only other realistic option is to create a virtualised sand box environment to run IE6 apps in, until you can dump them. Think multi millions of documents in a highly customised document management system that has no migration path or way of mass moving the documents in it and it will only work in IE6. Obviously the system is no longer supported by the supplier. Deep Joy !

Yes but it keeps you employed.

Funnily enough I've never worked an IE upgrade project.

Yes but have you worked on project that have kept WIndows 3.1 running in some department?

LOL no, win 95 yes

Yes

At one stage we needed old PC's that we could run 3.1 on as the application would crash if he PC was to fast. The only way I could get them was to make to the people in the office a "new for old" offer. i.e. give me your old PC and I will give you a shiny new office PC

Reminds me of an old CGA game I tried to play on a 486. It opened, you got killed six times and the game finished all in a tenth of a second. I think I managed to run it in Dosbox which you could set to emulate a slow PC.