The IT Nerd

According to ARS Technica, Microsoft goes out and pays a company named NSS Labs to report on Internet browser security and look what they find. NSS Labs believes that the biggest security risks to a browser are socially engineered malware followed by phishing attempts. So the company tested a range of browsers to see how they handle these threats. At the end, IE8 came out on top followed by Firefox.

Seeing as the tests were paid for by Microsoft, it would be a shock if anything other than IE8 won. But the question is, can you really trust the results? On the surface, the results have to be treated with some amount of suspicion because of who paid for them. I would love to see another party run similar tests to validate or disprove these results.

I must admit the cynic in me is having a hard time processing this at face value.

If you go to this website, you can download Internet Explorer 8 and at the same time Microsoft will donate 8 meals to Feeding America. On the surface, that sounds like a great gesture. It doesn’t cost you anything to download IE8 and some of the less fortunate will get fed. Win win right?

Here’s where the cynic in me comes out. If we look around the browser universe, we see the following:

• 11 million copies of Safari 4 were downloaded in the first three days of the browser being available.
• According to Net Applications as of May 2009, Internet Explorer’s global share of browser usage stood at 65.5%, compared with 22.5% for Firefox, 8.4% for Safari, and 1.8% for Google’s Chrome. Keep in mind that IE used to have a share around 90% of the market.

So is this about helping the needy, or is it about jacking their share of the browser market under the guise of doing good?

I’ll let you weigh in and give me your two cents.

My wife asked me to take a look at her computer last night as she was getting what she termed a “weird” update message. When I looked at it, I was kind of surprised to see that her copy of Windows XP was asking her to download Internet Explorer 8 as it was a “critical” update.

Since when is a web browser critical to the smooth operation of a computer?

I had been ignoring IE8 for some time, but I figured that now would be a good time to look at it. So I hopped onto my MacBook Pro and fired up Parallels Desktop to see if I could replicate the behaviour inside one of my Windows XP virtual machine’s. It didn’t take long before the system tray notification of a “critical” update appeared with Internet Explorer 8 being the update. So I downloaded it and installed it and rebooted the machine. On the reboot, it whipped me through a setup wizard. This is where you need to pay attention. During this setup wizard you will hit this screen:

Do yourself a favor and select “Choose Custom Settings” and walk through the settings in question. If you go with the express settings it may override things like your default search provider or your default web browser.

So what do I think about it? IE 8 looks better than its predecessors and “feels” somewhat faster. But I will have to say Google Chrome still loads faster and seems to load pages a bit faster than IE8 or Firefox 3.0.10. I’ll have to play with it some more to get some more meaningful impressions.

But I am not installing it on my wife’s computer as it is NOT a critical update.