Microsoft has released a critical patch for IE, outside of their typical once a month "Patch Tuesday" cycle. The reason is that this is a doozy, and it's being exploited. Internet Explorer users, here are my recommendations, in order of highest security to lowest security:
1. Replace IE with Firefox. The minor reason is that Firefox simply doesn't do ActiveX, which is a sewer of security badness. The major reason is that the Mozilla team is much, much faster to get security updates out. Days, not weeks. You find Firefox here. Or you could get Google Chrome (although Google is Evil) or Opera. Both are a security upgrade over IE. There's just less malware focused on Firefox, and way less malware focused on Chrome or Opera. That can always change, but that's the current state of the 'Net.
2. If you are still on IE 7.x (or Lord help you, IE 6) upgrade to the latest version tout suite. IE 8 is OK, and IE 9 is even better. You get Internet Explorer downloads here.
3. Apply the danged patch to your current Internet Explorer. This will make me sad if you do it, but hey - your browser, your security.
Me, I got an overdoes of Internet Explorer hate back in the 3.x days, switched and never looked back. The others work great, taste great, and last a long time for your chewing satisfaction.
11 comments:
Don't use Internet Exploder over here either... Missed ya today, you would have had FUN! :-)
Safari.
hmmm
have both explorer and chrome. should I uninstall explorer? Or if not used is it not problem?
Tacitus
OldNFO, it would have been cool to be there. A 7 hour drive each way, alas - not so much.
WoFat, there are a lot fewer exploits against Safari, but Apple has a very bad corporate attitude about security. Long term, confidence is not high.
Tacitus, there's probably no harm in leaving it there. I wouldn't recommend using it if you have Chrome.
I have to use IE 8 for a particular project, however it is running in its own virtual machine on top of OS X. The Virtual machine's image it on a BR disk so let them attack it if they want, if they do it is just for a session unless the exploit writers poke through the VM and OSX while using IE 8 as a vector and quite frankly if they do I am "teh hosered" anyways.
Chrome/FF user here. my fellow IT dorks and i only use IE when we have to (when we've gotta use institution stuff, since their sites don't play nice with anything OTHER than IE). i keep meaning to look into Opera again...stopped using it when it was more of a system suck than FF. how is it now?
Laura, I don't know if Opera suffers from bloat. There seems to be an effort to scale some of this down so that the browser will run on mobile devices. The latest Firefox seems to be considerably less of a resource hog.
http://www.palemoon.org/ FTW
I tried the latest Firefox and had to go back to an earlier version. The latest one wouldn't scroll, and kept locking up badly.
I know at least some people out there are stuck with IE, and even stuck with specific versions of IE. There is some web-based data entry software out there for certain very specialized purposes, for example, that ONLY works with IE 6, 7, or 8 and will die messily if you try to log into the page and do anything using IE 9.
Those people have my sympathy.
I might have to give it another go. Haven't used it in years...easily before the Wii had a version available.
The newest iteration of FF is definitely far more streamlined than its recent predecessors.
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