Making the best of IEFollow

Word 2007 is fucking retarded.

Can't say I didn't warn you.

Word 2007 is ******* retarded.

I like it, personally. Nexa: Not a fan.

I know. But in an argument with the owner over whether or not I should be allowed to use an alternate internet browser against the wishes of the IT guy, I'm gonna lose.

That's why I consult. In Smasharoo consulting, you get IT guy fired!

um whut f*cking bars? Glad I know the hotkeys or I'd be screwed using IE7 at work.

my biggest gripe with IE is the way it is so heavily tied into the kernel. any bad code will directly affect the system in a way that no other browser can. bad bad bad MS for that one and you would of thought with 7 and "security" being the big talk out of redmond, they would of done something about that

You mean shell integration. Everything that runs on Windows is "tied in to the kernel" through APIs. The problem you're referring to, which actually doesn't exist with IE7 at all, was the integration with the Windows Explorer Shell vastly increasing attack surface area. Most IE vulnerabilities have a lot more to do with ActiveX being a sieve than with integration.

um smash just try to seperate the GUI of XP or Vista from the kernel?

Hi. I think you're confused as to what a kernel is.


explorer is the GUI for windows so being tied to that you tie to the kernel.

No, it's the shell for the kernel in windows. Just like Bash is the shell for the kernel in Linux. The windows shell isn't any more "tied" to the windows kernel than Bash is tied to the Linux kernel. The lack of command line interpreter in windows doesn't magically make the graphical shell more "tied" to the windows kernel than Gnome or KDE is tied to the Linux kernel. You could say it was more closed, because it's proprietary software without available source code, but it's not some mystical process happening. Microsoft could easily separate the gui shell from the kernel (as we've discussed before you can do this in Windows Server).


still it is IE tied into the OS way to deep to make it a truely safe browser compaired to its competitors.

This is a pretty common semi-misconception. There primary reason IE is often viewed as so much less secure than firefox, and Windows less secure than Linux or OSX is really demographic. More novice users use IE and Windows. If the situation was reversed, and the average Linux/Mozzila/OSX/Opera was novice, you'd see more attacks there and they'd be perceived as much less secure.

People are exposed to attacks almost always because they are overestimating trust in code. They leave ActiveX controls on all the time, they download stuff that infects them and install it, etc. If Windows vanished tomorrow, apt repositories would be full of malware in short order and Mozilla would be patching FF every two weeks as exploits were found. People would download junk in Synaptic and install it. It's largely having a userbase that's a hard target that makes Linux more secure, not design.

Not even "try lobbying your idiot IT people to switch to OpenOffice"?

Open Office isn't good enough to replace MS Office for most businesses at this point. It's fine for most home users, but it's just not finished enough. The Spreadsheet app is particularly weak, which is unacceptable in a world where multi billion dollar businesses run primary via hacked together Excel sheets.

The fact that they're using hacked-together Excel sheets to do something that is probably better handled by commissioning a custom-written piece of software is what's unacceptable.

Sure, a custom front end to a million dollar data warehouse that people will use to cut and paste data....into Excel. It's just the way it is. It's easy for people to use, they're familiar with it and it's robust enough to use in even large scale deployments. OOO just isn't that, yet. Which is a shame, because really it's Office and Exchange that lock enterprises into Windows, not the back end stuff.