Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky

A couple of posts of people extremely frustrated with Internet Explorer/Win deficiencies sprang up over the past couple of days. Yesterday I ran into an article at Business Week (see Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky by Stephen Wildstrom). Today Roger Johansson's awesome site led me to a post by Molly Holzschlag Internet Explorer Too Risky. The pretext for this collective expression of frustration was an old flaw in Internet Explorer which can be used to quietly download a piece of malicious code and install keylogers and the like.

Vulnerabilities in IE is nothing new and the much-touted WinXP SP2 is supposed to resolve potential issues. The stance of patching IE so far has been to take action after something happens, not before, so we'll see how well SP2 performs.

A whole different story with IE is its insufficient support of the CSS spec. (Psst! This is where you roll your eyes.) During my Microsoft.com Home Page Redesign project I didn't use any child selectors in my stylesheet. IE doesn't support child selectors. I couldn't impose minimum or maximum width on anything. IE doesn't support it. And so forth.

Robert Scoble said everyone at Microsoft was too busy fixing security flaws in IE so there was no time to address CSS (I'm sorry, I can't seem to find the link in his blog-o-rama. Maybe he needs a search button or something) . I don't buy that even for a second! Would CSS adjacent sibling selectors affect download policies for ActiveX controls? Pardon my ignorance, but I don't think so.

Personally, I'm sticking with Firefox and Opera for now. Stephen Wildstrom said he had a hard time parting with the Google toolbar. Actually, in Opera you can run a search in a dozen search engines, Amazon, eBay, etc, right from a built-in toolbar. Firefox also has a Gogole search bar baked-in and you may add other search engines. If you're still missing something head over to Mozilla Extensions and knock yourself out.