I was just thinking about this brief exchange over on Dan’s blog, as well as some recent stuff I’ve been dealing with at work, and realizing that the endless stream of Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities is actually a tremendous blessing to us web developers.
Here’s why: While IE6’s implementation of web standards is still woefully inadequate, it’s certainly miles ahead of their 5.x versions, and I don’t even want to talk about any versions before that. Thankfully, the severity of the flaws in these earlier versions has basically made it a requirement for every Windows user to keep automatic updates on, and always get the latest patches and upgrades to IE. No one in their right mind would run a Windows box without keeping up on the patches these days, just because there are so many exploits out there.
This has the pleasant side effect of web designers being able to safely limit their testing of their pages to IE6, since anyone running any earlier version of the browser would have much more serious problems than their page looking funny.
3 Comments
Interesting
sounds like you’ve never gone to a ludite friend’s house to “help them with their computer” and had them say, “oh, just click cancel to that” on the norton prompt screaming that their virus blocker is running on 9 month old definitions.
people that have aol don’t keep their computers patched.
No, I’ve seen that plenty of times, but fortunately Windows has gotten better about it’s own update process, and will turn on automatic updates by default, which will keep IE patched.
It’s not perfect, sure, but worst case scenario is if they don’t do it their computer will get overrun with viruses and they will consider it “broken”, and have to go out and buy a new one, which will now come with automatic updates turned on.