Microsoft Talk

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

Lately, these past few months, i’ve been having problem after problem after problem with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. This article I found seems so timely. IE’s been freezing after I close a tab, radomly crashing and hijacking my tablet.

Yes, i’ve ran every ad/mal/spy/virus program known to man, and, boy, let me tell you, my tablet is clean as a whistle. Sooo, that tells me that MS’s IE is extraordinarily buggy.

IE has many significant security features and enterprise options that cannot be easily discounted. Unfortunately for its many users, IE’s dominance and complexity have made it the browser to attack. IE is also the only browser natively vulnerable to ActiveX control exploits.

From a security standpoint, it doesn’t pay to be popular. IE has had at least 70 announced vulnerabilities over the last two years, a frequency rivaled only by the second most popular browser, Mozilla Firefox. Firefox 3.0 has seen at least 39 vulnerabilities in six months. By contrast, Opera 9.x has seen 45 in two years, while Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome have 26 and 10 announced vulnerabilities, respectively, in their short lives.

IE 8’s updated anti-phishing filter, called SmartScreen, now also blocks sites confirmed by Microsoft host malware, regardless of whether phishing is involved. Like the anti-phishing features in Firefox and Opera, SmartScreen is not yet accurate enough to be completely relied upon. You’ll still need anti-malware software and common sense.

One of the smallest, but best security improvements is IE 8’s highlighting of the true domain name in the address bar when the name is embedded in a much longer URL. Phishers often embed the spoofed target’s domain name inside a much longer fake domain name string. This one small change makes it significantly easier to recognize phishing sites Microsoft has not yet confirmed. Chrome has this feature, but in addition to the domain name, it highlights the Web server name, which is often spoofed by phishers as well. Microsoft’s choice is more discriminating.

IE has always had good protections around privacy and cookie handling. By default, all first-party cookies are allowed, as are third-party cookies if the originating site has an explicit and available privacy policy (many don’t). Either way, IE restricts personal information gathered by both first- and third-party cookies. Cookie policies are applied on a per-security-zone basis, and they can be set on individual sites as well.