Internet Explorer (IE) is no less secure than any other browser and does not lack any important features, according to Microsoft. But the managing director of Cisco admitted that he wouldn’t use IE without additional protection.
At a security round-table discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Microsoft's security and management product manager, Ben English, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any other browser.
"Because IE is ubiquitous you hear a lot more about it, but I don't think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there," said English.
However, Ross Fowler, managing director of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, said the network giant uses IE internally but only after deploying its Secure Agent, which is a desktop utility that monitors all activity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual -- such as a keystroke logging program.
"Internally we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zero attacks and we have more and more of our customers -- particularly in the University sector -- deploying the Cisco secure agent,” said Fowler.
No threat from Firefox
Microsoft Australia's managing director, Steve Vamos, said that he did not believe IE's market share was under threat after the recent high profile launch of Mozilla's Firefox browser.
Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the threat posed by Firefox, he does not believe the threat is real.
"I’m not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos added, users needed educating about all the features already offered by Microsoft’s browser.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said.
Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it.
"I don’t agree is that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important. It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
Microsoft's English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing were not important to IE users.
"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn’t have the features that our customers want. We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team," said English.
Talkback
Yet more evidence if any were needed that M$ is totally out of touch with its users and is only concerned with its own revenue.
I'm reminded of the cart makers laughing at the new 'motorised car' shortly before going out of business.
"640k will be enough for most people" ... "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" ... famous last words of the rich and powerful.
Yeah right.
End-users and developers love Firefox. It's simply the best. M$ can continue to stick their collective corporate heads in the sand, but it's their loss if they lose the new browser war. No one else will lose any sleep over it.
Of course IE user don't 'want' tabbed browsing if they don't know what it is. But as soon as someone shows them, at least half say "that's really neat!" and there's another convert. And Firefox is only at release 1.0.
Inertia has kept me on Outlook Express so far, but now I'm happy with Firefox, I'm going to convert to Thunderbird for email, as part of my gentle transition to non-MS products in Windows; then switching to Linux becomes a piece of cake since I won't have to change applications at the same time. Bye bye Bill!
MS has nothing to worry about. Firefox will not work with my proxy server.
FireFox *does* work with proxy servers. I haven't tested the 1.0 release at work yet (where we are running the MS proxy server), but my current FireFox installation prompts me to login to the proxy and then allows me to surf the Internet normally. I think the point is that the 1.0-PR version attempted to authenticate with a proxy server automatically, but the feature was buggy and needed to be turned off:
Type "about:config' into the URL bar, search for the
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.allow-proxies
setting, and toggle it to 'false'. This is one bug that I'm hoping is fixed in the final release.
Who IS this idiot that works for M$ and thinks everything is just 'A' Ok ??? I would say he is deaf, dumb, and blind but he 'speaks, so I guess he is just deaf and blind. Does he not read what people have to say against MS or does he not hear anything?
MS will not update or fix any security problems with IE unless people purchase Win XP or an update to XP. Crap, it is the responsibility of companies that make and sell software to update it for free . Otherwise the internet will become more 'unsafe' day after day until all computers and servers are so inundated with SPAM and viruses that the systems will crash. It is to MS advantage to provide updates in a timely manner and ensoure that their products are SAFE for all consumers.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Who has never used Firefox"
*laughing*
"Firefox is not a threat to IE"
*dies laughing*
Market share for IE should not be a concern for MS as they don't sell it. It's one of those "free' features in Windows. If it generated revenues then it might be a concern.
As for web sites opening up to other products, I switched to Safari 2 years and most sites worked fine. Those that didn't (banks and retirement accounts) have now joined the fold. They've learned that IE is not the only thing out there and they need to work with Safari and Firefox to accommodate customers who use them.
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
Hmm... Proper CSS support perhaps?
It isn't IE features that are the problem, its the swiss-cheese style security holes that appear in every M$ product.
Just hope the Guys at Firefox don't sell there soul to the Devil if Firefox takes off big time. As we know in the past M$ is quite happy to buy any product from anybody at any price just so they can slap their EULA
on it and sell it back to us at a price !!!
' "If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
Hmm... Proper CSS support perhaps?'
And trnsparent .PNG support.
And www XHTML support.
In fact pretty much every part of it needs to be redone. It's just a shame since IE is integrated, many people think "It's there, why use anything else?"