Because it's there. Why would Joe Home User want to download a new browser, especially if he's unfamiliar with the new Dell he just received at his doorstop?
Could it be because "doorstop" is the right term to use in this context? What
better time to take greater control of your system? (Well, after you download all the patches needed by your "fully installed" Windows XP.) We are suggesting
Mozilla so strongly because
Internet Explorer (IE) is so fundamentally broken as to be rather dangerous in many ways. Let's look at the facts:
* Microsoft has admitted, in print, that IE has serious problems--but that they will not be fixed until the next version of Windows. Paraphrase: "There will be no new stand-alone versions of IE." That new version of Windows, currently codenamed
Longhorn, is not slated for release until
2006 at the earliest.
* There are dozens of critical vunerabilities in IE, many unpatched for years. In fact, many of these flaws
cannot be fixed. Because it is "integrated" with Windows, the whole system is made massively vunerable.
* ActiveX controls are high on this list, and so closely related to the
DCOM/RPC vunerabilities exploited by the
Blaster worm and its variants as to represent a gaping hole in any security wall a user tries to erect, including hardware firewalls. When a website uses ActiveX controls exclusively, it is exposing its users to unintended consequences through potential malicious exploits. This also excludes other operating systems, and even other browsers, from accessing those controls--a slap in the face to the "universal" Internet.
* The
Java Virtual Machine that has shipped with Windows for many years is about to be pulled; good riddance. Its Java implementation was broken-by-design to such an obvious extent that Sun won a court judgement against Microsoft. By using this bad Java implementation in IE, MS was able to force more sites to use ActiveX and other proprietary controls to get the needed functionality. Whether you use IE or Mozilla, download and install the
Java Runtime Engine (JRE) from
Sun right away. At this time, it is unclear what effect that the recent settlement between MS and Sun will have on Java.
* Mozilla Mail is inherently more secure and flexible than
Outlook Express. Do the names
Melissa and
Kournikova mean anything to you? Applying patches over patches on such an inherently poor code base is like patching a rotten tire over and over again--and makes the same amount of sense.
* The implementation of several useful Internet standards developed since 1997 (the time of the last major revision to the IE code base) are seriously hampered by the dominance of IE. These include (but are not limited to)
cascading style sheets (CSS),
dynamic HTML (DHTML), and
extensible markup language (XML). The last is especially ironic, given how loudly MS is talking about its (mangled)
XML in Office 2003.
* Last, but not least, Mozilla has many intrinsic features that are kludgy add-ons to IE. These features include tabbed browsing, an integrated pop-up stopper, better cookie controls and other improved security features, and much more. The pretty-cool
Maxthon front end for IE (formerly
MyIE2) adds
some of these features, but does not fix the underlying security issues. The
Windows XP Service Pack 2 also addresses some of these issues (most notably, more control over ActiveX), but
Windows 98/Me users are still out in the cold--and winter's comin'.
The above discussion applies not only to the integrated Mozilla browser/mail/HTML editor suite, but also to the next-generation stand-alone
Firefox browser and
Thunderbird mail reader, also available from Mozilla.org.
I know many of you will not use Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer, just as many will not use
OpenOffice.org in place of Microsoft
Office, or
Linux instead of Windows--but to be ignorant of the problems inherent in any path that you choose involving something as integral to your life as your computing (truth, or you wouldn't be here
) is like walking across a freeway during rush hour, blindfolded, and trusting the drivers to
not hit you.
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