Internet Explorer 8 Offers Improved Privacy And Security

[Saint_Michael 3]

**cough** fangirl **cough** excuse me I had to clear my throat for second. Besides the obvious fact this girl got paid to write this article in favor of Internet Explorer 8, it would seem that there might be some valid points why Internet Explorer 8 will be great. Not lets be reasonable here, is it the greatest browser in the world? Yes and no and I tell you why, it is the greatest browser in the Internet Explorer family tree but compared to the other ones, still not even close. I try to prove my point as I break this article on down.

 

Easy to Deploy you say, where have you be for the last 15+? obviously it is easily to deploy because Microsoft has been building Internet Explorer into Windows for years now. Of course 95% of the whole world hates Microsoft because of that and thus the reason it is easy to deploy because with other browsers you have to do various tweaks in order for them to do with Internet Explorer does. Besides it is not the matter of network support, most users are either students, home users or Microsoft and IE haters and sure other browsers are slow to develop on that because of the fact Microsoft wants to make sure nothing else but their products get in, especially in a network environment.

 

Again, where have you been, designers have hated Internet Explorer 7 for years because of the web standards issues and what not, why would you want to hype a browser that has failed and converted others to other browsers that conform to standards. Granted the smartest move Microsoft did was throw out a beta release because now designers have the time to see how truely broken websites are because of IE 7, but odds are that it will take a couple of years for everyone to revamp websites, intranets, software applications etc etc. Less we forget with HTML 5 and XHTML 2 quickly on the rise Microsoft will either have to push out IE9 or do some patch to keep that browser current. I rather see the latte but I doubt it will happen.

 

Well at least the author admitted that Microsoft stole the crash tab idea from Google, I think Mozilla did that for 3.1 but not aware if Opera has that feature, I know Safari doesn't. However, I think one feature they left out that IE should take from Firefox is restore sessions, you don't know the many times I am glad that restore sessions save my butt, Microsoft should at least do the same.

 

Better Productivity

 

Really who cares what you can do with tabs, bloating them with extra features just does phase all that much, I thank Firefox for turning me off to that. Do you really need to color code your tabs? I think it is unnecessary and redundant because if you don't know what tabs are for what then you shouldn't even be using the tabs or using more then one of them. However, I do like the fact they included some sort of shortcut function and like many others I do happen to do the copy and paste thing as well, even on Firefox as well though I have a few extensions for the right click. As for the web slices, I am in the middle of there usefulness as I didn't use IE8 all that long when the first beta came out, but odds are I give it a go when the full version comes, because my days with IE7 are almost over. The only original idea IE came up with the url bar was you can delete the suggestion, other then that, if you haven't been living under a rock and have been using Firefox 3 for awhile then you need not be impressed by this update.

 

Private Browser

 

HA!! I knew it, well ok I had a suspicion that private surfing wasn't really private, but again if your going to use private surfing as a feature, make no connection whatsoever that is including caching websites that collect information from you. We all know everyone visits the Myspace and all the other social networking sites during school, work and at home, but it would seem your activities still could be trace if look in the right spot. Of course, on the buusiness side of things I bet there will start installing spy software to monitor your browser habits both private and public as that will be the only way to catch that slacker.

 

Better Security

 

Even if the security of the browser has improved, the rest of the world is a lot smarter then most of the staff designing the browser and since it has been months now since IE8 has been out. Odds are every whitehat, blackhat, redhat, bluehat hacker out there has stuff ready just to see if Microsoft has caught it or not. As for XSS, to me I think that always been an enigma security breach, just because everything has to be right for a successful XSS. Of course, I wouldn't doubt that is part of the payload for trojans, worms, viruses and other bad stuff. As for clickjacking, that is a whole new one on me unless its part of the phish scams that go around, but I would have to agree with another article that this will a well exploited tactic for the hacker underground.

 

Overall this article is a bit misguided and it seems to be gear to the corporate world and not the whole world and just because it has a bunch of cool features doesn't mean it is the best browser in the whole wide world. You need a few thousand extensions running with your browser to make it the coolest browser in the whole wide world

 

 

SOURCES

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/