Nicht mehr den Internet Explorer?
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 2:34PM | Alfred Huger For all my German-speaking friends I will start by apologizing if I butchered the title. I was hoping to query "No more Internet Explorer?” That question is probably being asked a fair bit in Germany and France right about now. Both governments recently advised their constituencies to ditch IE in favor of other browsers.
I'd have to be on record that I think this is poor advice because it's at best a short-term fix. It's true that IE has had a long history of security vulnerabilities, but this is also true for all browsers that have been around long enough and have a large enough user bases.
The more functionality we push into browsers, the more complicated the web becomes, the more we have to add to our browsers to compensate. 'More' in this case means more code, more code means a higher likelihood of mistakes of which some portion will be software vulnerabilities that will be exploited. It's all math at the end of the day and Firefox, Safari and Chrome are no more immune to it than IE.
What makes IE more dangerous is that it has a larger following. People looking to exploit software vulnerabilities for profit are generally going to follow 'Sutton's Law'. Willy Sutton was a famous bank robber who when asked why he robbed banks replied, "Because that's where the money is". People research IE and exploit it's vulnerabilities because it has the largest user base. If you incite people to abandon it in favor of other choices those other browsers will start to suffer the same fate. This is not a problem that's going to be solved as simply as changing browsers.
My advice, consistently, is this:
1. Upgrade to IE 8 - it's much better.
2. Get off XP to Windows 7 if you can.
3. Turn on automatic Windows Update.
4. Run up to date Anti-Virus software
