IE8 hacked

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It depends on system administration. No matter how good your operating system, in the end you are always yourself responsible for security.
At my old school the LAN had a Linux Server but the admin was a complete idiot and the system was wide open. You could access it from home via telnet, install a rootkit and get most of the students and teachers passwords by dictionary attack (most people take pass"word" a little too literally). But the s**t didn't hit the fan until "someone" installed sub7 on all of the school's computers and pulled the Matrix stunt. All computers went black and "The Matrix has you..." appeared in green letters on the screen. It was coolness incarnate. After that everyone who was sitting at a PC when it happened was banned from ever using them again. Even better all computer rooms were closed for weeks while the "crime" was being investigated. It was ridiculous. The culprit was never identified.
Okay that was a bit off-topic. What I wanted to say is: Don't think you're safe because you are using the most secure operating system/browser/whatever. Most malware depends on user stupidity.

The reason MS hasn't bundled more stuff with Windows is because they face anti-trust regulation. Most Linux distros include what the developers believe to be the best available software (usually OOo, FF, etc).

Are you really using IE6? That's a bit scary. I agree with you on the benefits of having multiple browsers. At any given time I normally have 3 or 4 installed.

Did I say every OS and EVERY browser is PERFECTLY secure? No, I didn't. What I meant was, everybody on this board gets up on a soapbox thinking that Firefox and Safari (basically anything Non-IE) is perfect, and then as soon as something comes out about IE it's OMFG, but with Firefox or whatever it's "eh, they'll fix it". Guys, seriously, before you go "OMFG" get your damn facts straight. Nothing is perfect, and just because it's made by MS doesn't mean it's bad (although I do agree, IE is pretty vomitrocious...)

When FF2 and FF3 were hacked within minutes of release did you start threads about those, too? Or are you just a fanboy?

^ if you had the decency to at least read the thread, Ashton, Orwell and LostInEmulation already talked about this.

I'm lazy.

Not really, they just mentioned the obvious that not all software is secure (esp when just released). I was explicitly pointing out direct comparisons with IE8 and FF.



No, you're a fanboy.

^ if you had the decency to at least read the thread, Ashton, Orwell and LostInEmulation already talked about this.

You being a fanboy?

Firefox has a lot of fans because it's a great browser. I'm not sure why there is so much animosity towards IE (I haven't used it since the 90s) but everything I've read indicates that IE is significantly less secure than other browsers. Does that mean non-IE browsers are perfect? No, and I haven't claimed that they are. FF still doesn't pass Acid3, and it has its own security vulnerabilities. However, they tend to be less severe than IE vulnerabilities and are usually patched faster.

Most stuff made by MS, in my experience at least, has certain problems I don't want to deal with. MS software tends to be extremely bloated, and often is not compatible with non-MS software or even compatible among different versions of the same MS program. Now, non-MS software carries its own set of problems, but I've learned to work around them. If you find it easier to work around Microsoft's problems than around Canonical's or Mozilla's, then by all means use MS products. I'll stick with using what I like, though, and that doesn't happen to include a whole ton of MS products.

I've had pretty much the same experience as you Orwell. It's not that firefox is hacker proof, it's that firefox running on linux and avoiding free pr0n sites is far safer than running IE and dorking about on myspace all day with no firewall. Nothing is hacker"proof", it's just that it's a bother to hack the three people running my exact configuration, so instead they go after the millions running windows with IE. It's more common, gets more victims. Thats why Macs are safe, just not enough use of them to be worth a hackers time. They all wanna be the big one, not the first one.

Besides the security questions there other reasons: The support for CSS of IE is quite weak, but with IE6 horrible bad.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary