More Kudos for IE....NOT!

[KennyR]

Rodney wrote:
But even so, MS products are some of the most complicated software in the world. Especialy with their OS. It'd be damn hard to manage a project that large.

They've only made it hard for themselves by poor visualisation of new additions and even poorer execution. DLL hell and most of the other criticisms of Windows comes directly from this.

Microsoft have good products and thats why their the most dominate Software house in the world!

If you went by that logic, IBM or Sun Microsystems would dominate the world, since their software is a lot better than Microsoft's.

Microsoft dominate the world because they bundled their bad software with PCs, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with their skills. If the market was open to real competition Microsoft would do very badly, unless they improved a lot.

[Lemonty]

I think I discovered a bug in IE:

Type any adress in the URL bar, preceded by "://" withouth the parentheses.

Crashes in XP

[Rodney]

When i say best software, im not talking about how buggy it is or insecure because all software has these characteristics. Im talking about its features. Also, im not neccessarily talking about their OS. Im talking about MSOffice and other applications. Their Office suit is one reason why their so HUGE. Because that is a good office suit and no other office suit comes close. OO is good but not as good as MSOffice.

The thing is, geeks often run around accusing MS of all the wrong when similar flaws are found in their favourite products but when it happens, they think its ok cause a patch will be out soon.

Linux is a good example of this. Because of linux's fast adoption, more security flaws are being found. The only difference is that the linux community fix these problems very fast indeed. The opensource model is a good model for secure programs and less buggy software but it still has its disadvantages, like those Wayne pointed out a few years ago when trying to find good web-content software.

Most people just bitch about Windows these days because its the fashionable thing to do. When linux is a huge monopolly everyone will prolly flock to BSD and start bitching about linux.

[Seehund]

People running unpatched Win+IE installations might want to have fun with this little christmas present for a while.

(Nothing harmful. At least not if you don't have a desktop computer with a cup of coffee or a can of Cocal Cola standing in front of it...)

Did it work?

[mikeymike]

@ Lemonty

Doesn't crash IE here.  IE6 SP1 / Win2kSP4.

[mikeymike]

When i say best software, im not talking about how buggy it is or insecure

Ok.  Here's an example.

Web brower X has all the features anyone might ever want in a web browser.

However, anyone with the simplest of exploits can get your credit card details, access to any files on your hard disk, and trash your machine.

Is it still the web browser in your opinion?

[mikeymike]

Linux is a good example of this. Because of linux's fast adoption, more security flaws are being found.

I agree, in that this will hold true with any product as its usage increases.  However, if a vulnerability is found in one product by the security community, competing products are also usually tested to see if they also are vulnerable, and reports made accordingly.

With this in mind, there are, on average, 20 unfixed vulnerabilities in the most up-to-date, patched version of IE.  6, on average are "critical" vulnerabilities.  Compare to competing web browsers, say Mozilla/derivatives and Opera, where there is on average one unfixed vulnerability at any time.

I said previously about MS prioritising functionality far over security, reliability and performance.  I'll add to that now.  What is far more dangerous about MS software is that by default, the state in which the product is shipped to the customer, is with everything wide open.  On other operating systems, for example - ssh on UNIX derivatives, you can't log in remotely as the 'root' (highest privileges) user by default.  It has to be configured to do that.

When linux is a huge monopolly

Unless some company chooses to adopt MS typical tactics (which should be illegal), no operating system will ever have a monopoly.  Why?  Because users will always have a choice.  The opposite is a monopoly situation, when users have little or no choice.

[ottomobiehl]

It seems like alot of the little security problems found in Microsoft Products are found by these companies that test the software for security bugs.  Why doesn't Microsoft have something like that in place before they release their products or at least hire these companies to help them out before they release their products.:-?

The other thing is that without any decent competition Microsoft IMHO has gotten lazy.  I think if they had to fight for 40 or 50 percent of the worlds marketshare they would be a lean, mean coding machine.  That is also why I have such High hopes for OS 4.  We know they are starting from the bottom so they have to make sure everything is tight and works well. ;-)  And I [color=006699]know[/color][/b][/i][/u] that they are going to pull it off. :-D

[mikeymike]

It seems like alot of the little security problems found in Microsoft Products are found by these companies that test the software for security bugs. Why doesn't Microsoft have something like that in place before they release their products or at least hire these companies to help them out before they release their products

No amount of in-house testing, short of never releasing a piece of software such as a web browser, will ever provide as thorough testing as in the outside world.

The people who are employed at security companies, or just active members of the security community, are pretty damn clever people.  Many of them probably used to crack/hack into systems as well, and in some cases, particularly security-related, the phrase "to catch a thief" springs to mind :-)  

Also bear in mind that IE earns MS no direct revenue.  How much can a business justify spending on such a product?  Which is why MS announced they wouldn't be releasing any standalone new versions of IE, only as part of new operating system releases.

Also, if a company can get away with shovelling bug-filled crap and customers buy it, why should they bother improving their QA, unless their revenue stream is at risk.

The other thing is that without any decent competition Microsoft IMHO has gotten lazy. I think if they had to fight for 40 or 50 percent of the worlds marketshare they would be a lean, mean coding machine.

Variety is the spice of life.  Competition certainly spices it up as well :-)