Browser Security News

It’s been a weird couple of weeks for Internet Explorer and, as it turns out, me. On August 7, 2006, Jeff Reifman blogged about a supposed statistical analysis of Internet Explorer (IE) 6, IE 7, Firefox, and Opera in which each browser was scored for its standards compliance. According to this data set, Firefox 1.5 complies with 93 percent of the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) 2.1 specification, compared to 93 percent for Opera 8.5, 96 percent for Opera 9, a woeful 52 percent for IE 6, and an equally problematic 54 percent for IE 7. The issue here was clear, assuming the data was correct: Despite its multi-year development, IE 7 would offer only a negligible advantage over IE 6 in a key Web technology.

Jeff also used an article I wrote, IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch as further proof of IE 7’s ineptitude. In that article, I wrote that IE was "a cancer" that must be stopped. "IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators," I added. There’s just one problem. Those words were penned over a year ago, and Jeff had mistaken the August tagline as being from August 2006, not August 2005.

Adding to the drama, Richard MacManus wrote about the issue in his ZDNet Blog as well, after reading a Slashdot post. By this point, IE 7’s supposed standards failings were all over the Web. And I was thrown right into the middle of it. Unfortunately, I’m just about half-way through a three-week trip to France, during which I’ve had limited access to the Internet and what I hope is an understandable (and temporary) lack of interest in work. Last week, Gary Schare, the Director of Windows Product Management at Microsoft, sent me an urgent email explaining what was going on. But he, too, was heading off on his own vacation. Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Internet Explorer 7: Flawed or Misunderstood?