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A First Look At Internet Explorer 8 RC1
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 17, 2008 09:24 AM
from the well-lookit-that dept.
from the well-lookit-that dept.
bogaboga writes "TG Daily reports that Microsoft quietly released the first update to its IE8 beta 2 to its closest partners last week. This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute. It is marked as 'Release Candidate 1.'"
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But does it fix the critical vulnerability? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But does it fix the critical vulnerability? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:But does it fix the critical vulnerability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it does mitigate that vulnerability. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both have the ability to enable DEP/NX heap protection. Unfortunately, due to certain extensions like Adobe Flash being written like shi... written in such a way that they weren't compatible with DEP/NX (I won't even get into them dodging protected mode, just see: http://keznews.com/4244_Vista_hacked_on_3rd_day_thru_Adobe_Flash__Linux_Undefeated_ [keznews.com]), but anyway, because of extensions like Flash and Java which weren't compatible with DEP/NX, Microsoft was unable to enable by default the DEP/NX protection in Internet Explorer 7 at release. However, you can enable it now since most plugins have been modified to work with DEP/NX.
To enable this protection in IE7 right now, go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and check the check box next to "Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks". If you're running IE8 beta 2, you should notice that this check box is checked by default. This change should mitigate a significant number of future remote attacks against Internet Explorer 8.
If you check the advisory, one of the work arounds is enabling the DEP/NX protection in IE7.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:5, Funny)
This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute.
It's true, it improves to 100/100! The reason you need to leave the browser open for at least a minute is because that's how long it takes to download this extension [opera.com], install it, run the extension and put the acid 3 URL into the extension's address bar.
I recommend anyone who loves IE to do this!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
i never liked IE in the past, but 7 was ok, and I find myself actually liking IE 8. I've never looked at the source code to Firefox, so I could care less about my browser being open source. As far as security holes go... well I have vista with UAC enabled, so I'm not too worried. All browsers have security holes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
well I have vista with UAC enabled, so I'm not too worried. All browsers have security holes.
Yeah--Just like every car has it's problems, that why I choose to drive a Yugo. I mean--why go with a quality car that has fewer problems, when you could get a POS Yugo? All cars break eventually, so why not get one that will break within 5 minutes of owning it?
Even better, get one with no door locks, or even doors themselves--because all cars have security weaknesses...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
i just go with the best of both worlds.. i own a volvo and an MG.. one is basicly maintence free for 120k miles.. the other required me to bring my tools to get it running so i could drive it home (well half way.. the other half i used a tow truck)
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:5, Informative)
You COULDN'T care less.
You could not care any less, because you absolutely do not care.
If you COULD care less, then you care some non-minimal amount.
Parent
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:5, Funny)
It's a whole nuther thing here if you could care less. It makes me nauseous at how this nukeular power supposably is illiterate for all intensive purposes. I hate it, irregardless.
__________
__________
Now my head hurts.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
IE8 version is a vast improvement, even if passing ACID3 wasn't as high of a priority.
Well-phrased. I'm a FF user, but stray to IE occasionally depending on what I'm doing. I have Opera & Chrome installed too, but I have run them very few times since install.
For me, like (I suspect) the vast majority of web users, a good report card on ACID3 isn't a big selling point. The question is, "Will the pages I use the most render quickly and look nice?" NOT "Is the browser standards-compliant and will it make web development easy for people that I never see or care about?" For right or wron
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you didn't sign up for the course in the first place.
Parent
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:5, Funny)
However, it passes ACID 2 with flying colours.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might find something interesting about a new ACID test which IE fails miserably the instant Microsoft releases a browser which passes the old one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes I think that the only real definition of "geekdom" is "a solid understanding of cause and effect".
That's why when they get a compromised system or otherwise suffer, I don't see them as victims even though I'd rather they not get compromised and I'd rather they not suffer.
They are making a trade-off and are taking a risk of experiencing security flaws for the sake of convenience as the browser is already installed and knowledge of its quality and security history is not needed to use it. They have set their priorities and made their choices and now they experience the results. Really, what rational person (technical or non-technical) expects to have good results when operating an extremely complex machine that they don't understand? Is there anywhere else in life where you can take the very first option to come along without ever looking at your other options and then consider yourself to have made a good choice? That the average person can routinely use a computer this way and have everything work out as well as it does is amazing, but rather than appreciate this we instead scratch our heads and wonder why certain problems (like botnets) just aren't going away.
Maybe this makes me unusual, but I am happy with both Linux and FireFox even if both of them never become anything like mainstream. They are actively developed and have enough of a userbase to ensure this for some time to come, they do what I need them to do, and they run the way I want them to run. I can't say with any certainty that I'd derive any direct benefit from the sort of ubiquity that Windows and IE currently enjoy and I see a certain risk of stagnation if that ever did happen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And for any IE die-hards out there, the best remedy to keeping your system safe is to make the "Windows Update" site your home page. That extra minute is
Re:Why It Takes an Extra Minute (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
IE needs a new slogan... (Score:5, Funny)
How about:
Internet Explorer: Holding the Web Back Since 2001!
Re:IE needs a new slogan... (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer the older standby - empowering 0wners since 2001
Parent
IE 10 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:IE 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
By the time IE 10 comes out, it will look like what Netscape 2.0 looks like to today's market. Even today, users hanging on to IE are reminiscent of the die hard users of Netscape 4. Netscape 4 was awful in comparison to IE5, but since it was the only viable alternative to IE, it hung around for quite a while. Life got a lot better when the Internet purged NS4, and it will get a lot better when it purges Internet Explorer.
The only difference between the Netscape 4 debacle and Internet Explorer is that Netscape didn't have the resources to develop a better browser. They ended up needing to spin off browser development, thus resulting in Firefox in the long term. Microsoft has no such constraints. They have nearly everything they need to make IE a better browser, but they don't want to give up their stranglehold on the web.
Well too damn bad. It's only a matter of time before IE loses its majority market share. The more the IE percentages drop, the faster the uptake of alternative browsers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it was. Show me any mature product that isn't.
But i cannot imagine any circumstances where the best strategy is to scrap and replace everything.
This isn't about purity of codebase, which is what the OSS adopters you mentioned concerned themselves with.
This is about a commerical software company who chose to cease shipping their flagship product while they redeveloped it.
If they had to do it, they should've maintained and upgraded the NS4 base with 4.x releases while the new product was in developm
Re:IE 10 (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Surely you can't be serious - It scores higher if you leave the browser window open for a minute?
What is it, an Oldsmobile?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Some people STILL think they should use IE (Score:4, Informative)
Like this guy: http://www.highdefforum.com/768120-post19.html [highdefforum.com]
I don't know how someone can say "IE is not any more vulnerable" with a straight face. And it only scored 12/100 on compatibility tests? RUN from IE.
Re:Some people STILL think they should use IE (Score:5, Funny)
The best (worst) argument for IE I've ever heard was "to save disk space".
Parent
Damn, did I really not know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Coincidentally, I just watched Blade Runner on my Sony Superbeta hi-fi, still looks fantastic after all these years. Suck it, Blu-ray.
Re:Damn, did I really not know? (Score:5, Informative)
Now that is not to say that things still will not change for instance with the release of parts of Office 2007 some products would work in the RC phase on Windows 2000 but come release they stopped working. However at that phase you can usally start developing for the new product and it will work on the release with at most minor changes.
Parent
Re:Damn, did I really not know? (Score:5, Funny)
In Microsoft speak a RC is a feature complete product, parts are still buggy but the capabilities are in, they still reservice the right to add features but will not remove them.
Really? I thought that was the definition of "service pack 8".
Parent
Could have fooled me (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually saw an IE8 ad earlier this week on-line (geared for enterprise computing firms) I thought it was final and out already.
Yep, MS even has a slick site already up for it:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
IE (Score:5, Funny)
is like a bad smell that wont go away
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, IE 8 still sucks, but it sucks less then IE 7, which sucks less then IE 6.
IE 8 has some decent rendering improvements, a built in XSS filter, and lots of other changes.
In standards compliance it still sucks versus all the compition, but as long as it helps kill off IE 6, I'm happy.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just don't add a usability POV to that mix. IE7 and 8 give me nightmares.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
In standards compliance it still sucks versus all the compition, but as long as it helps kill off IE 6, I'm happy.
As someone doing web design for a living for the past 10 years I can tell you that I'm really not happy. At all. I put standards compliance much higher than any gimmick like XSS. If firefox still had all the Extensions (which is hard to live without) but was not standards compliant, I would hate it, a lot.
Another IE that is not standards compliant, means or a new set of rules I cannot use on my code, or another set of hacks (already ahve one for 5, 5.5, 6 and 7
Parent
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, ~50 % of websites tested in the past year by WhiteHat Security. It's the best metric we currently have for security flaws, as WhiteHat has many customers across quite a few industries, and they are all automatically retested over time. It has little to do with the browser targeted, and everything to do with the web frameworks used, the knowledge of the programmers, and the testing or lack thereof most websites get before deployment.
If you check xssed.com [xssed.com] you'll see that near 100% of websites have had XSS vulnerabilities in the past.
Parent
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure IE8 will be broken in slightly different ways from 6 and 7. So all this really means is we will have to implement hacks for three different versions of a shitty, non-standards-compliant browser for the foreseeable future, instead of two.
Parent
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Even simple HTML can crash IE8 (Score:5, Informative)
<table>
<tr>
<td><div style="width:100%;height:100%"/></td>
<td>
<div>
<span style="height:100%;width:50%">></td>
<span style="height:100%;width:50%">></td>
</div>
</td>
<td><div style="width:100%;height:100%"/></td>
</tr>
</table>
Re:Even simple HTML can crash IE8 (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Even simple HTML can crash IE8 (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing should crash anything.
Parent
Re:Even simple HTML can crash IE8 (Score:5, Informative)
This is a highly ignorant comment. A browser should never crash due to poorly written HTML, or due to anything. From the security angle, this is at least a DoS, but likely something more. Take a look at the IE7 0-day which is affecting millions of users. It is not a buffer overflow; it's a simple crash. However, because of JavaScript, one is able to manipulate ("spray") the heap enough to a point where even a simple crash can be used for code execution. ANY crash in a browser should be taken seriously.
Parent
Not following standards costs us (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not following standards costs us (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the acid tests are just one indicator of how well a browser does standards. To make it the defining standards test would not be completely fair. More info on that here [webstandards.org].
Parent
IANA Coding Guru, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being that M$ tied their browser to their OS to avoid a court judgment of having an illegal monopoly the main reason they're in this pickle in the first place? You can't nimbly fix bugs or create features if what you do on that level ends up crashing your OS on another level.
Seems to me they've screwed themselves in the long run. They avoided having to removed Internet Explorer from Windows, but now their browser sucks on ice, is bloated, slow and filled with bugs that affect the OS. All of this could have been avoided (not to mention the continued $ hemorrhage of having to pay programmers to work on this) had they just concentrated on a decent OS and let others create the browsers. Instead they have (and still) pig-headedly insist on taking over or competing with every bit of software that touches their computers.
12/100? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not rename it? (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the reasons I've heard for MS is not fixing all their rendering bugs, is that there are so many web pages out there that already work around the bugs, with user-agent sniffing. i.e. If the user-agent contains "MSIE", then use a different stylesheet, or embed a style attribute in the HTML to override the stylesheet.
But couldn't they fix the bugs if they just changed the user-agent string to not include "MSIE?" Internet Explorer is already a brand name with so much infamy and negative goodwill anyway, that renaming the product makes sense even if they don't fix any of the bugs. But if they do that, then they could fix the bugs too, without triggering all the world's websites' MSIE workarounds.