Microsoft's IE Is the Most Targeted Application By Security Researchers 96
darthcamaro writes "Though Microsoft hasn't yet patched its Internet Explorer web browser in 2014, it did patch IE at least once every month in 2013. According to HP's 2013 Cyber Risk Report, more researchers tried to sell IE vulnerabilities than any other product vulnerability. 'IE is the most prevalent browser on the systems that attackers want to compromise' said Jacob West, CTO of HP's Enterprise Security Group."
Re:Bear in mind (Score:5, Informative)
Not having used IE since ver 7 I was really surprised that IE 10 and 11 are actually decent enough to use for a while when some firefox or chrome update breaks shit, but it still has its fair share of annoyances. Please allow me to enumerate a few of my annoyances with IE 11:
1. You can block flash fairly easily, but only on a site-by-site basis, and once you whitelist a site you can't remove it without removing *every other site* you've whitelisted. C'mon IE, I only want to allow flash to watch some stupid video on this site this one time...
1.a Oh yeah, flash is baked in to the browser now, but it seems to be a shitty version that stutters on streaming videos making it a crapshoot whether or not it'll be watchable.
2. There is a built-in tracking/ad blocker but again, there's no fine-grained control without really dicking around with some ... file.. somewhere. IOW it's not intuitive and it's very difficult to whitelist a particular site's ads without fucking IE's whole ad blocking program.
3. IE finally renders shit correctly, uhh, except for all the "legacy" shit that was built with workarounds for older versions of IE, like e.g. vBulletin.. And I don't "get" IE well enough to tell it how to tell the site to STFU and give me the firefox version (which renders correctly in IE BTW) since IE doesn't seem to like to play nice with user-agent strings outside of its archaic F12 devtools..
4. Fucking font rendering SUCKS. Microsoft took an enormous step backwards with their font renderer in windows 8/8.1 and it really shows in IE.
5. IE is now reliable at recovering the pages when it crashes, which is good 'cause it crashes a lot.
I'd like to interject that I sometimes use and enjoy IE now, but I just need to get this off my chest.
6. Private browsing is good, unless you want to have 2 or more private browsers open on the same site like e.g. two or more gmail accounts open simultaneously, which you can't do because the cookies are shared amongst them... Well, you can if you have one open in the standard IE and the other in private mode, BUT NO MORE.
7. it's finally reasonably secure, or at least the competition is now equally insecure.
Any more I don't choose a browser because it has features I like, I choose a browser because the competition has pissed me off, and it's an arms race to see which one can get to the bottom first... Firefox is shitty, chrome is shitty, IE is shitty but which one is going to piss me off the most today?