Story: Browser security is an open and shut case

Posted by: Anonymous (Saturday 1 October 2005, 7:33 AM)

Follow the money! Microsoft incurs neither decrease in sales nor share price damage for shipping an insecure, non-standard browser. In fact, they benefit from shipping a non-standards browser since most users won't change their browser. Because of that, most developers look for MSIE compatibility and stop there. This creates an arena in which standards based browsers lose out for users, weighting the field against non-MS browsers. The security issues are usually secondary or tertiary to being able to view the web as the web sire developers expected it to be seen. For example, you may be unable to see product details, buy a product or pay for a service.

I have successively used Netscape, Mozilla and now Firefox. Over the years I have grown so used to being unable to order (especially from smaller sites) that I routinely expect to switch to MSIE in order to submit feedback (saying that the site is inaccessible, or unusable by non-MS browser users) or to buy. Banks, too, have required MSIE in order to manage my account online.

As a sometime system admin, I care about security. The costs of recovery from a compromise are huge. But most users will simply pay an "MS tax" to license Symantec or another AV and anti-spyware solution, to correct for the defective software that MS ships. Symantec's interests lie in working with MS. Because MS doesn't need to fix the bugs, Symantec have a market. Open Source has a commitment to work correctly, with only trivial bugs; commercial software relying on shiopping programs that correct for MS software defects will therefore have some antipathy towards nominally bug-free software.