By now you may have heard about the coordinated hacking that targeted Google and other corporations, exploiting intellectual property and obtaining user details for specific e-mail accounts. An advisory from Microsoft has stated that the hack was made possible by a security vulnerability in several versions of their browser, Internet Explorer – including IE6, IE7 and IE8.
Although Microsoft is working to patch this, the governments of Germany and France have recommended that users switch to an alternative browser and at the minimum to ensure that they are using the most up-to-date version of the browser possible.
Have you updated your browser recently?
Oddly enough, I stopped using Internet Explorer as my primary browser a couple of months back. As a web content manager, I found that it has been more reliable testing website code and layouts using Google Chrome or Firefox – if the style syntax isn’t quite right, those two browsers will show me that it’s wrong. They also have handy tools to check the sections of code and see what styles are being applied to each part of the page.
In my experience, Internet Explorer will let a designer “fudge” the code a bit – and although a site might look fine in that version of Internet Explorer, the presentation in older versions and in other browsers can be completely different.
So, although I do take the security risks that have been revealed in Internet Explorer seriously – and would recommend that all browsers are upgraded to the most recent versions, if you don’t want to try a different browser – my reason for making the switch is simpler.
I want to make sure I’m producing standards-compliant code, and alternate browsers make it much easier to do that.
