IE Vulnerabilities Page Removed

Henry V .009 writes "PivX Solutions has removed its (in)famous Unpatched IE Vulnerabilities page. Is Microsoft really getting better? From the site: 'Given Microsoft's recent positive actions together with the current rise in attacks against IE we have agreed to give Microsoft a good faith reprieve and have taken down our 'Unpatched' page. This was done in both a spirit of cooperation and for the good of the internet as a whole. As the ubiquitous browser that is utilized to access the internet, we all depend on IE too much to have crooks, social deviants, malcontents and crackers from messing with our lifestyles and our livelihoods. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!'"

Comments

Google to the rescue...

[wo1verin3]

Google cache

Re:This can't be serious

[DotNetGuru]

Uhh, check out Google's Zeitgeist. It includes browser usage stats, and just about everyone is using IE. I'm sure you're aware of this and were just trying to be pedantic, but you're just being stupid.

Re:This can't be serious

[Condor7]

I expect that most of the sites that track this use the browsers identifier string to compile statistics.

I use Opera, and it comes preconfigured to misidentify itself as IE 6.0 - probably in response to the websites that check the string and won't let you in if you aren't using Netscape or IE.

Re:One of my favorites

[Phroggy]

It's not really valid HTML though. I assume that IE looks in comments and parses stuff inside them ([If IE]...[endif]).

Yes, I cheated so I could pass W3C validation. They're called conditional comments. If I wasn't using conditional comments, the code would not validate, but IE would still crash, and other browsers would not crash (although they would show a form field, defaulting to type="text").

A short history of IE vulnerabilities:

[Futurepower(R)]

A short history of vulnerabilities reported by PivX:

• June 18, 2002: 18 vulnerabilities
• August 8, 2002: 22 vulnerabilities
• September 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities
• November 19, 2002: 32 vulnerabilities
• December 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities. (Microsoft fixed 15 on Nov. 20, but two new ones were found.)

(From my article: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

This is a mistake

[rossz]

Unless there is bad publicity surrounding a security hole, Microsoft does nothing. Keeping the security problems public and well known give us (the internet community) several things.

1. Incentive for Microsoft to fix the problems.
2. Warnings to the community of just how common these problems are.
3. Fun ideas to implement in web pages to mess with idiots who insist on running IE instead of anything else.

Re:This can't be serious

[pHDNgell]

Does ANY of the other browers somehow render web pages better or worse?

Well, yeah. Find anything with even CSS1 that does a remotely complex layout. For example, some guy put up a page describing how to do rounded corners on boxes in css. At least half of the css included in that thing is made up of IE workarounds. Some of those workarounds exploit IE CSS parser bugs in order to get different stuff in the engine to get it to render like everything else.

I use two different browsers with two different engines regularly (Mozilla mostly, Safari (kHTML) sometimes). They *usually* give me similar web pages from the same HTML. IE usually requires workarounds if you do anything remotely complex. Sometimes, it just goes bad.