I’ve worked for companies who, for whatever reason, never upgrade from the pre-installed version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. I’ve always been astonished by this because all of the other browsers are free and a massive upgrade over IE. I don’t just mean the big browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera either. Sea Monkey and Flock, Camino, Shiira, Omniweb and iCab are also better.
Maybe, just maybe, this latest news will be the catalyst that finally gets the 26% of web users that are still on IE to make a change. On Saturday, when no one was paying much attention, Microsoft confirmed that a new vulnerability has been found in every version of IE to date:
“The vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated. The vulnerability may corrupt memory in a way that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user within Internet Explorer. An attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website.”
As Ashley Feinberg at Gizmodo points out this means that anyone unfortunate enough to still be using Windows XP (including the US Internal Revenue Service) won’t even be getting a patch for the flaw.
Good luck everyone, and seriously upgrade already.
