Quake3World

It's really an IE exploit, but allows hackers to exploit machines that have Google Desktop. Sounds nasty.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5980623.html

Mmm IE... :icon3:

internet explorer

seremtan wrote:internet explorer

Unfortunately, about 75% or higher still use it..

The majority being amongst the less computer-savvy. Firefox is only real competition amongst more computer-literate users, the ones probably needing to format less than once a week.

Lets not conveniently forget the number of corporate machines running IE.

That could account for 1/3 of that figure. It doesn't directly counter the static fact that IE still has a higher usage than FF or Opera, but it does go a long way to explaining why. Corporate inertia & dependency.

Not "conveniently" forgot, just forgot

I wasn't trying refute it being the most used browser, rather that it was because of lack of knowledge on some peoples part, and like you stated, laziness in other situations. I'm not accounting for the people who just prefer IE.

I think my point was that not that many people here should have to worry, or at least I'd hope not.

I wasn't really replying to you, you henious misanthrope

Well it's out there now :icon33:

Then I suppose we're gonna have to live with that.

Foo wrote:Lets not conveniently forget the number of corporate machines running IE.

That could account for 1/3 of that figure. It doesn't directly counter the static fact that IE still has a higher usage than FF or Opera, but it does go a long way to explaining why. Corporate inertia & dependency.

It has nothing to do with "corporate inertia". It has to do with the fact Firefox, Opera, and Netscape have no policy-based management options, don't package easily, have no centralized update process, and don't play as well with some popular corporate intranet apps (Sharepoint for example). Add to that the fact most admins don't want their users installing a bunch of free extensions and its pretty clear that IE's competition has a long way to go before they are viable in the corporate space. IE can be quite secure if properly configured via Group Policy (which applies to all workstations in a given domain or organizational unit), it just isn't incredibly secure out of the box. Just to give an example, IE has more than 400 policy-controllable options after XP SP2 all of which can be configured, tested, and rolled out through one window. This is in comparison to no policy extensions at all for the competing browsers. There is no reason that they can't write those extensions either since the information is freely available and the policies are merely ADM files which reference various registry entries in Windows. They just haven't bothered (yet at least).

Look at Firefox's number of critical security vulnerabilities over the last year in comparison to IE's and think of how much of a pain in the ass each of those would have been to patch in a corporate environment. You would have to package the new version, test the new version, then distribute it across the LAN or WAN after scripting an uninstall of the older version. That process takes at least a few days, even in a fairly small network. In a large network there would have to be meetings and approval from various levels of management which would turn the testing/patching/upgrade process into a project which would take months. Now consider that for each IE vulnerabilty in the past year it took me less than ten mouse-clicks per network to apply hotfixes across each domain. All of the workstations in those domains applied that hotfix within 24 hours and I could check an intranet site the next day to see if any workstation had an error while trying to install the patch(es).

Technology just for technologies sake went out with the dot-coms :icon26:. The competing browsers are going to have to step way up if they want to give IE a run for it's money in the corporate environment.

:icon14:

hating ms is nerd chic

fyi

http://www.cio-today.com/news/Google-Fi ... 1000DNG0PQ