mway’s blog

The other day, I saw something deeply troubling.  It caused a fair amount of confusion at first and, for a brief moment, made me question reality: Microsoft is putting IE8 on a pedestal and discrediting every other major browser.  While not entirely shocking, this came from the same company whose reps, when at web conferences, would start with things like, “Okay, so… we know you guys hate us.  And we know we suck, but we’re trying to get better.”  Now, now, Microsoft.  Life isn’t all that bad.

That isn’t to say it’s all that good, either.  From a company whose strength lies in proprietary software, platforms, and standards, it’s hard to see Microsoft being very much in line with the evolving web.  If you consider the fact that the Internet (aka, Al Gore’s Internet Tubes) is evolving to be a global social community, and the technologies used are becoming more and more widespread, it makes less sense to keep everything under lock and key as time goes on.  Granted, Microsoft has been making decent (albeit abstract) progress with new services like Bing, but they have a long, long way to go.

Anyway – a recent IE8 promo stated that IE8 is essentially the king of all browsers.  Microsoft boldly states that features like security, privacy, ease of use, reliability, compatibility, and manageability are benefits exclusive to the latest Internet Explorer release.  Anyone who has used IE8, Firefox, Chrome (the only 3 browsers Microsoft samples), Safari, and Opera for about 5 minutes knows that this is a complete farce bordering on insanity. You’re right, Microsoft – most web-based exploits don’t stem from ActiveX controls or browser security loopholes in IE.  Errrr… right.  It’s both largely disrespectful and an outright lie to actually promote their checklist as being anything remotely true.  It is beyond me how anyone can buy into that at all – somewhere, on some level, Microsoft has to realize that they are not pioneering anything anymore.

For example, both Safari (which was not sampled) and Firefox make use of extensive security controls.  Safari 4 was released with “Privacy Mode”.  Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are all massively simple to use, and if you use a final release of Firefox, both Firefox and Safari and extremely reliable (despite FF’s memory issue).  Firefox is extremely compatible, with its endless supply of add-ons and great support for migrating from IE (good thinking, Mozilla).

Tangent: I guess “browser security” depends on your definition, though – whether they mean from the outside, or from yourself, because when you’re coming from something like Vista, everything at least seems secure.  Do you want to do that?  Are you sure you want to do that?  You need to confirm that you want to do that.  Are you sure that you want to confirm that you want to do that? They really set themselves up sometimes.

Moral of the story: don’t buy into any company (not just Microsoft, but specifically in this example) propagandizing you; find out for yourself.  If you don’t know enough to find out for yourself, get a general consensus from the web – do some kind of research – otherwise, we will be chained to the sinking ship that is bad browsers until propriety drags us to its cold depths.