December 18, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Microsoft’s emergency patch for IE has been available since yesterday evening. The hundreds of millions of Explorer users are now able to protect their systems adequately and switch back to the world’s most popular browser without fear. Crisis over, for now at least.
The post-mortem however, is only just beginning, with industry experts asking just how it’s possible that such a huge name in the online community could be exposed like this, particularly when their competitors, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc., managed to avoid the flaw. Web journos and casual bloggers alike are asking, is IE safe now? Has it ever been!?
When caught up in the furore surrounding this, there’s a real danger of journalists over-egging the hysteria or responding to their baser instincts and indulging in the ever popular sport of Microsoft bashing. Whilst I’m certainly not above this sort of thing, I think it’s important to remember that all browsers have exploitable vulnerabilities and occasionally get caught out like this.
In a sense IE is a victim of its own success. I can’t, for example, imagine that a similar flaw with the Opera browser would get quite so much play in the media.
The valid criticism of Microsoft in the past was that they didn’t respond quick enough (or as quickly as competitors) to security issues. This time they did and they should be given credit for it.
Related posts:
- Emergency patches for Internet Explorer holes issued by Microsoft
- Serious IE Security Flaw
- European Commision reusmes hostilities with Microsoft
- Microsoft denies Media Player Flaw
- Attacks list 2009 dominated by Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader
- Security and ease of use: the twin Watchwords of IE8 (Part 3)
