Computer help: IE7.... Have they fixed it yet

Seems to me...

And maybe this is what Bob was talking about... But most of the people having problems had some sort of spyware issue that did something to the system that caused the IE7 update to go wrong.

Whatever the case, there's no good reason to be using IE7, or IE at all. It's a favored target of spyware peddlers and other web scammers, and IE7 offers no compelling features that weren't already in the likes of Opera and Firefox a good couple of years earlier. Combine that with the improvement in security offered by either of those two browsers, and there just is no good reason to use IE. The only time it should ever be used, is for downloading security patches. If you come across some site that won't work with anything but IE, move on to the next site. I wouldn't do business with a company that said I had to drive a Ford or Chevy car, and I won't do business with a company that tries to mandate what browser I use just the same.

Easy

Tracking cookies are easy to take care of with Firefox. You just set it to delete all cookies when you close the program, or to ask you about every cookie, and then either block them or only allow them as session cookies. Over time, as you visit all your regular sites, you build up a list.

And of all the threats out there, tracking cookies are at the bottom of the list in terms of severity. They only showed up on your system because you weren't aware of how to set up Firefox to handle them. Also, the acclaimed security of Firefox is that it's immune to IE Browser Helper Objects (BHOs). This is the form probably 90% of all malware takes. IE BHOs are virtually no different from any other program you install on your computer, in that they are not very restricted in their abilities to interact with your system. This allows BHOs to compromise your entire system, not just your web browser, which is the worst case scenario for Firefox.

It's good to know what it is you're talking about before you go making accusations like that. IE6 has been regularly exploited for over 5 years now, and it doesn't help that Microsoft has an abysmal track record on security as a company. This means that IE7 is in the position of having to prove it's a secure program, and until it does so, the safest position to take is that it's not significantly better than IE6 on security.

This is very basic analytical thought. The sort of thing you should be running through mentally with almost everything. You should have done it so much by this stage in your life, that it only takes you a few seconds to process at the outside. If you don't, now's as good a time as any to start. At the very least, it'll help you to avoid making embarrassingly easy comments to pick apart like you did.

IMHO. Not possible.

by R. Proffitt  - 11/30/06 7:18 PM

So far I'm seeing too many IE 7 disasters.

My thought is what what plagued XP SP2 upgraders is a culprit/cause.

What do you think?

Bob

(NT) Was it by chance d/l'd from a Yahoo! site?

Let that be a lesson

Moderators here are just regular people. The majority of them are not particularly skilled with computers. The average Cnet reader is similarly not very adept with computers. Lots of things can be done to the computers of these people, without them ever noticing. Things like malware slipping in via one of IE's many exploitable security vulnerabilities.

All leading to a rather skewed sample for the Cnet moderators to draw conclusions from. For the reasons above, and that people are less prone to commenting if everything is functioning normally. It's only when something goes wrong that they speak up. All of this skews the sample even further.

There's even a technical side to all of this. Not that many IE6 users noticed, but the IE6 rendering engine is a broken, garbled mess. You have no idea the pains that web developers go to to try and get a website to look "right" in IE, but it's significant. Why Microsoft did this is unknown, but from looking at past moves by Microsoft, the best guess is that they were trying to get everyone to adopt their broken system of making web pages to make life more difficult for everyone else. If indeed this is the case, it didn't work like they hoped, and so now they're trying to bring IE in line with web standards. More so than IE6 was at least. This puts Microsoft in a difficult position of having to try to support both it's own older intentionally broken system, while at the same time trying to support official standards. They took a gamble with IE6's broken rendering engine, lost, and now have dug themselves a pretty deep hole, dragging a lot of websites down with it.

There are a whole host of reasons that kind of gang up to make life difficult for IE7, it's developers, and users. But the moral of the story should be, that you shouldn't consider the average Cnet moderator's opinion to be any more informed than someone you might know at work, the neighborhood computer whiz, or even your own in some cases. Also remember that an opinion is just that, they should never be taken as a statement of fact. Just because someone on Cnet thinks they see a lot of bad reports about IE7 doesn't mean the majority of people have no problems, or that people not complaining on Cnet aren't having more numerous and severe problems.