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AppleOptionFour · Mar 21, 2005, 01:12 PM

Opening line: "Don't go ripping out Microsoft's Internet Explorer just yet."

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/artic...,120087,00.asp

What do you think about the arguments he makes? I feel like M$ paid him to write this.

dlefebvre · Mar 21, 2005, 01:15 PM

What is IE? It use to be some kind of web browser, right?

Mar 21, 2005, 01:32 PM

What a moron. He faults Firefox in the business category because it doesn't have ActiveX and some businesses rely on it.

Oh please. If a business uses actual standards then it's not an issue.It should never have been brought up. The heading "Business Needs IE" is total horsesh*t. A particular business may have locked itself into IE, but that doesn't mean business itself doesn't. I work in a company with over 30,000 employees. I ditched IE for FireFox and I rarely have problems with the security and the functionality.

Yeah, I agree. I think the MS ad exec phoned up PC World and decide they wanted an IE vs FireFox article, and reminded them on how much they spend on advertising in PC World.

Millennium · Mar 21, 2005, 02:02 PM

Security Testing
This test had nothing whatsoever to do with security. The author didn't even know what Active Server Pages is, or he'd have known that it's a server-side technology, not browser-side. It doesn't run in any browser, and so IE doesn't "have this feature" any more than Firefox does.

Firefox Fundamentals Better?
To say that Firefox supports "less complex scripting mechanisms" than IE is laughable. If anything, the mechanisms it supports, such as the DOM, are more complex than the IE misfeatures it lacks, especially by the braindead standards of Microserfs like him.

It is true that Firefox supports fewer "features", however. It doesn't support the fundamentally-flawed ActiveX paradigm, nor does it support the underpowered VBScript, nor does it support nonstandard CSS filters. I cannot fault Firefox for any of these, however.

What to Do?
Again, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. There are no tools which can reliably force one browser for external access and another for internal access, unlike what this moron suggests.

Common Attack Scenarios
This page provided no data on the actual tests being run, or the actual results. We are supposed to accept the conclusions by their fiat alone, without seeing the actual data.

This is irresponsible, unprofessional journalism on a scale not seen since John Dvorak.

JohnSmithXTREME · Mar 21, 2005, 02:42 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:

This is irresponsible, unprofessional journalism on a scale not seen since John Dvorak.

In that regard, this is almost as bad as MOSR!

Millennium · Mar 21, 2005, 02:51 PM

Originally posted by JohnSmithXTREME:
In that regard, this is almost as bad as MOSR!

Even MOSR publishes the data from their tests, on the rare occasions that they actually do any testing of their own. This article didn't even do that.

Love Calm Quiet · Mar 21, 2005, 02:59 PM

Amazing...
His employer's (his company's?) site...
http://www.canola-jones.com/aboutcandj.html
...says he has 30 years "experience in the design, development, and deployment of networking and security software"

Do you wonder what kind of "experience"?

Millennium · Mar 21, 2005, 05:06 PM

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
Amazing...
His employer's (his company's?) site...
http://www.canola-jones.com/aboutcandj.html
...says he has 30 years "experience in the design, development, and deployment of networking and security software"

Do you wonder what kind of "experience"?

I'm forced to wonder. The credentials seem legitimate enough. Is it possible that the author of the article is actually somebody else, posting in his name for some reason? This article contains errors that someone of this man's caliber has no excuse to not know better than to make.

wdlove · Mar 21, 2005, 05:15 PM

I very seldom ever use IE. The icon is still in my Dock.

ink · Mar 21, 2005, 05:42 PM

Umm, IE for OSX doesn't support ActiveX... That's a Windows technology.

Millennium · Mar 21, 2005, 05:56 PM

Originally posted by ink:
Umm, IE for OSX doesn't support ActiveX... That's a Windows technology.

Actually, IE/Mac does support ActiveX controls, but they have to be specifically written for the Mac. I don't think anyone outside Microsoft ever actually made such controls, and even Microsoft doesn't seem to have used them for anything.

Cipher13 · Mar 22, 2005, 02:31 AM

I deleted IE a long time ago... Safari (I used to hate it, but it has improved a lot) and Firefox rock.

Mar 22, 2005, 10:57 AM

I've donated to the Firefox project in the past and still use it quite heavily. I do find myself using IE on Windows more and more though, especially at work where our internet T1s are oversaturated. IE just displays pages quicker, as weird as it sounds!