Microsoft mulls rushing out IE patch

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Why use MSIE?

Remember last week when the Sendmail bug came out? Sendmail released the fix immediately, but there was lots of the usual discussion about why people would still use Sendmail. Other MTA with a significantly better security track record are available, such as postfix.

Yes sendmail is venerable. Yes it's widespread. Yes they do a heck of a job in releasing bug fixes fast, but why not just use a MTA that has fewer bugs in the first place?

Now take that argument and apply it to the browser. No, you don't even have to go into the OS realm (leave the discussions about BSD and Linux and MacOS behind). Just look at the browser.

IE has a lot of bugs. Unlike Sendmail, MS doesn't patch them really quickly (arguably, they can't). There are numerous bugs tabulated in IE that MS doesn't fix.

Now look at the other choices. Just on the Windows platform you have Mozilla and FireFox and Opera. All these have bugs too, but they get patched faster. More importantly, there are FEWER of them.

So WHY do people use MSIE?

It's not even as binary a choice as the MTA. You choose postfix or sendmail, not both. Anyone with windows could use Firefox as their workhorse, and keep MSIE for broken pages that only work with IE.

So why??

Posted by: mobrien_12@...   Posted on: 03/25/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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