Security

There are several flaws within Internet Explorer 6, some well known and some not so well known. With serious attacks, there are also tiny apps called keystroke-logging Trojan horses, which capture IDs, passwords, and credit card information as you type them. This happens without users even knowing there’s anything wrong. At this time, only Windows users are at risk; Mac and Linux users, are safe … for now.

As a side note: Mac have long since stopped supporting Internet Explorer and now suggests Safari, Opera and Firefox as the ideal browser software.

Microsoft launched its war against Netscape a few years ago. We were encouraged to ‘optimise for Internet Explorer’ and were lured by the ability to display flashing images and pretty sounds. Internet Explorer now holds a commanding 95% of the browser market and due to its dominance, the engineers have been pretty slack with browser innovations and making the software secure.

In the wake of serious security events, Microsoft announced instructions to secure Internet Explorer. Put simply, you need to increase security settings within Internet Explorer - turn off Javascript and ActiveX* and start reading email as plain text (because Outlook uses Internet Explorer to render HTML). In other words, we should turn off all that web developers were told to optimise for. No more flashing images, great sounds - just bland, old flat web pages.

There’s one flaw that Microsoft fixed six years ago in Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0 that resurfaced in versions 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0. Microsoft has since posted a patch for one of the new Internet Explorer flaws, but it waited a week to do so, and this patch still doesn’t resolve all the problems.
If you decide to stick with IE, you can also stop remote-access Trojan horses with a good personal desktop firewall included within Norton Internet Security and McAfee Internet Security. Finally, several of the banking Trojans can be removed with apps such as Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-aware, plus antivirus apps. If you aren’t currently checking for spyware, you should be. And if you aren’t running antivirus protection, well, now’s a really good time.

IE6 and Web Design

IE6 was released in 2001 and was the most widely used browser until September 2007 when Firefox became more popular. However, even now IE6 users outweigh the users on IE7.

Many users feel that they don’t need to upgrade their browser - after all, they can view websites and download their email - why bother? From a design point of view, more and more web developers will stop catering for IE6 and websites will look less attractive, forcing users to upgrade.
This isn’t due to developers becoming lazy, we are trying to encourage the use of standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera and even IE7. With the beta version of IE8 due out, this will become even more apparent.

We have moved into a new phase of the web. With the advent of new technologies and new developments, IE6 is now just too old to accommodate these changes which in turn, holds back the advancement of the web. IE6 is not standards compliant and is therefore not a part of the present or the future.

Whereas a site can look fantastic in other browsers, it is, when viewed through IE6, often a complete mess. Padding appears when not asked for, images are not aligned properly throwing the whole site out of whack and extra line breaks are added. ARRGH!! This is the time when developers cry

IE6 does not support PNG images. With high speed internet connections, developers are not as concerned with the size of images and the need to optimise as much as possible. PNG’s are high quality images that allow for transparency - rather like a high quality GIF. These are a great way of including more detailed gradients or backgrounds. However, in order to make these work in IE6, we need to create ‘hacks’ and special style sheets just to accommodate - this in turn adds to the development time and overall cost of the website.

At this time, developers have managed to fix more of the common problems with ‘hacks’ and know what to test for but there is always something new to fix. At present, we end up making a special style sheet for a browser that is now 7 years old.

So the main question is ‘why don’t users upgrade?’ Is it due to the upgrade being a download and they don’t feel they can trust it .. or is it down to ‘what they feel comfortable with?’ - There are great browsers out there so get browsing and enjoy viewing web sites as they were meant to be viewed.

1. Download Internet Explorer 7
2. Download Firefox
3. Download Opera
4. Download Internet Explorer 8 beta

* ActiveX is a component object model (COM) developed by Microsoft for Windows platforms. By using the COM runtime, developers can create software components that perform a particular function or a set of functions. A software can then compose one or more components in order to provide the functionality it intends to.[1] Many Microsoft Windows applications — including many of those from Microsoftsuch as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, Windows Media Player, etc. — use ActiveX controls to build their feature set as well as encapsulate their functionality as ActiveX controls so that the functionality can be embedded in other applications. Internet Explorer also allows the ActiveX controls to be embedded inside web pages.

 



Posted in Browsers and Security, Custom Design, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design