• Office Productivity
• Email
• Browser Security
• Web Design
• Remote Working
• Anti Virus
• Web Content Filtering

• Sitemap [6]
• Accessibility [0]
• Print This Page
• Browse Products... OpenIntranet OpenAccounts OpenPlant OpenHouse OpenHip OpenCMS OpenSupport

• Home
• About Us
• Our Products
• Consultancy
• Contact

Browser Security

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has always appeared to have an unssailable hold on the web browser market. Despite its market share, Microsoft's flag ship browser has always been plagued with a constant barrage of security vulnerabilites. Couple this with an aging set of features and the emergence of a number of more modern, capable web browsers and its easy to see why Internet Explorer's global usage is slowly being redistributed among the other players.

In less than four years, the Mozilla Firefox web browser has managed to steal an almost 12% share on the usage market. The browser originated from its older brother - the Mozilla Suite - and has become so popular, 100 million users have already switched.

Good Reasons to Switch

Why should you make the switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox?

Security

It's a well known fact that Internet Explorer is a breeding ground for security problems. Hackers regularly target Internet Explorer and they, due to Microsoft's hold on the market, know that any vulnerability uncovered can be utilised against nearly 90% of machines on the Internet. There have been more attacks against IE than any other Windows component to date.

In addition to the above, IE uses Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX scripting component. Although this has the ability to add a number of convenient features, these features come at a cost. The majority of the more serious vulnerability hacks have targeted ActiveX, in addition to two other convenience features that IE ultilises; VBScript and browser helper objects (BHOs). Although the new version of Internet Explorer (IE7) addresses of number of these security issues, the underlying problems remain and it's hard to imagine that, due to the nature of these components, the security problems will ever be completely resolved.

Possibly the largest security problem related to IE is its interoperability with the Windows operating system. The way in which IE is integrated with Windows poses even further security issues. If a hacker succeeds in penetrating your IE, then the same hacker may also have access to areas of the operating system.

Aside from the security problems relating to the browser itself, Microsoft's track record when it comes to fixing critical flaws in IE has always been poor. In some cases they have even denied the existence of such flaws and instead adopted a policy of "blame the messenger for the message". This has consequently led to a number of critical patches for IE either not being released at all or released months after they were initially discovered.

This is not to say that other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox are not exempt from flaws. In fact, in theory exploting an open source web browser should be much easier than a proprietary package such as IE, as the source code is readily available for anyone to look at. In practice however, this is not the case and it is not uncommon for the Mozilla development team to fix critical flaws in their software within a matter of days - a far cry from Microsoft's poor track record.

Flexibility and Configurability

Internet Explorer 7 adds a number of key browsing functions through the use of 'addons' that were not present within IE6. These however cannot compare to the thousands of extensions and addons currently available for Firefox. For those who use Firefox regularly, these extensions are not considered nicities - they form an integral part of the browsing experience and many users would be lost without them. One such example is the Adblock addon, which conveniently blocks the vast majority of web ads and popups. There is no such addon currently available for IE7 (at the time of writing).

Tabbed browsing is not just a fad, it makes browsing more productive by conveniently arranging your current websites into tabs. You can easily switch between sites by clicking on your tabs. Using a web browser in this way also means that there is no need for multiple browser windows taking up valuable taskbar space. Microsoft have finally managed to catch up by including tabbed browsing as standard in IE7, although its implementation is haphazard and not as streamlined as the Mozilla based browsers (that have included tabbed browsing since its original release pre 2000).

Product Updates

Internet Explorer 7 can only be used by those users running Windows XP SP2. Those on earlier versions of the Windows XP operating system have already been abandoned - forced to use a far more vulnerable and unstable version of the Internet Explorer range (IE6). To make matters worse, it was recently announced that all security updates for IE6 will only be released for those running Windows XP SP2. Consequently, those on earlier version of the Windows operating system will be left open for attack. This announcement will inevitably embolden hackers to target earlier versions of IE and Windows. A good reason to switch if you are not using Windows XP.