Take the shame: Microsofties ADMIT to playing Internet Explorer name-change game Internet Explorer could be getting a new name as Microsoft tries to escape the browser’s troubled past. One of Redmond’s IE engineers copped to the news during an AMA on Reddit late last week. Asked whether Microsoft had ever considered rebranding IE, browser engineer Jonathan Sampson 'fessed up that, after nearly 20 years, …
Reminds me of the hitchhiker's guide episode:
Arthur Dent: "You mean you have a solution"
Ford Prefect: "No, I just knocked the bottle of wine over. But I do have a new name for our problem!!"
Quite a common marketing ploy of course. Re-brand your product once you have realised the brand name has become a liability rather than an asset.
ActiveX support in the browser can easily be classified as one of the biggest Microsoft mistakes of all time, even worse than TIFKAM.
Allowing any kind of code execution, (even installation of binaries!!!) inside something like a browser is bad enough from a security standpoint. Convenient it may be, but increases the attack surface by an order of magnitude. We have had enough JavaScript and Java vulnerabilities to prove that.
Allowing native, binary code execution inside the browser is the next level in hell and plain horrible. Exhibit A: the "fixes" for that mistake developed over time ("trust zones", "killbits" and who knows what else) are nasty kludges that get in the way of what a browser can be used to.
Microsoft should have dropped ActiveX support in IE5, or perhaps in the latest IE4 service pack. Instead they choose to keep it for compatibility sake. Had the few apps developed at the time been forced to move away from using ActiveX controls inside the browser at that time they'd saved an incredible of man hours in developing and patching.
"90% of exploits involve Java"
... which as you know (and already commented) it is implemented as an ActiveX control?
And Java is now the target of exploits only because 90% of exploits first involved Active X, then 90% of exploits involved JavaScript, then 90% of exploits involved Adobe Acrobat. Now 90% of exploits involve Java because all the other, easier, avenues have already been exploited. From time to time a ghost from the past resurfaces as a "using memory after freed" JavaScript exploit or exotic combination of content in JPG/PDF content that triggers some buffer overrun.
Exploits are developed according to its difficulty and popularity of the software being exploited. ActiveX was by far the easier to exploit and universally available thanks to the market dominance of IE. And it only became sort of secure by making it close to unusable except in corporate environments with dedicated support staff who can afford to spend the time in making the right incantations in IE configuration.
Rarely an issue?
Try Honeywell's security camera recorder web interface. It requires Java AND ActiveX.
The worst of both worlds, it requires IE, and makes no guarantees about running on any recent version of that.
Internet Explorer rename?
A sows ear by any other name will still never be a silk purse, and will still smell just as bad.
MS' problem is the Standards. The more compliant to Standards a browser is, the more you are compelled to compete on features the user wants or else just become part of the wallpaper. With Standards, the better you are, the less distinctive you are and the less brand awareness you have.
Of course, with so much media being offered over the web, MS finds that non-paying, end-user customers are less lucrative than its paying DRM-requiring or advert-requiring customers.
Thinking about my own preferences, on Windows, I install FF specifically for noscript and ad-block. Cross-platform GUI similarities also make it and Chrom(e/ium) easy to use. I install Chrome for its good IE compatability/Windows integration for corporate sites and for research, its adobe compatibility and simplicity. IE hits me with yahoo's home page. Easy to turn off, but I hate it and it just turns me off the whole experience so I just avoid it. It's probably a good browser but I just don't use it. Indeed, calling it Internet Explorer makes me thing its a bolt-on to (file) Explorer, like Konquorer is/was. It get nervous using what was supposed to be a local tool to access internet stuff. I like separate between the OS and the application.
I've always found "Idiot Exploiter" to be profoundly pithy, succinct and almost supernaturally accurate. Comes with the huge advantage of retaining the existing "IE" abbreviation too. Perfect!.. so they won't choose that then.
No doubt $MSFT will want to *appear* high-brow and businesslike. So, what about "Iliua Equi"?
This post has been deleted by its author
Big E is taken. It is the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, a.k.a. the Quarter-Mile-Island.
Well, it could work since you probably can't avoid it, and it's been dropping cluster-bombs (and all other sorts of bombs, for that matter) on your premises for the last decade. And it employs 5000 - odd people.
Except people on the real big E are extremely competent and can also provide disaster relief at catastrophy-stricken places if need be, which MS can't.
I will leave the backronym exercises to our expert El Reg readers, but we could call this new browser by C.R.A.P. or B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. or B.A.R.F.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
