Once upon a time I was helping a customer to get videos playing on his browser. He was using IE so I went ahead and downloaded flash player.
When I launched the executable it got stuck while downloading the flash player files. I closed it, tried again and the same thing happened. So instead of spending 2 hours figuring out why it isn't installing while having the customer wait I decided to install Firefox.
The flash player for FF installed right away without problems. Youtube actually worked even without flash because of HTML5 but what mattered was that the problem was solved and customer was happy.
My superiors have seen what i've done and told me off because apparently i did a botched job. They insisted that I should have gone back to that customer and fixed the flash for IE.
Then they were trying convince me that IE is more secure than other browsers. That I am leaving our customers vulnerable to malware by making them use different browsers. And in few months time something is going to blow up in my face. lol :D
So I am asking the community is Internet Exploder really more secure than any other browsers in general?
In my opinion closed source software is generally less secure than open source alternatives because flaws in open software are clearly visible given the amount of eyes that can see the code and thus are patched much more quickly but whether that makes IE more insecure is debatable. It is common knowledge that some older versions of Internet Explorer are notorious for security issues (namely IE6) in most cases this infuriates web developers because IE6 didn't really care about implementing the proper web standards which meant code written for Firefox/Chrome doesn't necessarily work on IE6 but that is a story for another time.
I bet their trying to promote IE if there doing that to you at work. Tell them otherwise with facts and they'll shut up, I had people who tried to do this to me and I had a "Are you kidding me?" look and explained why THEY were wrong, never heard back from them since.
Plus 99.99% of security issues is user fault, I wouldn't worry about it blowing up in your face regardless.
IE is about as "secure" as Lynx is. And, if no one has used Lynx before, it grabs shit with wget and formats it for your terminal of choice.
Your superiors are fools.
Reading that, I had a similar experience at the school I worked at. Teachers would use IE... I think 7? Is that what came with XP? And I used a USB with a portable version of Opera in it that had an SSH shell in it so I could work on stuff I had at home. Most of my papers were written in Nano by the by until the school would shut up about letting me have a laptop :P
So anyways, one teacher saw me doing paper research but saw the terminal in the bottom doing things. I had a machine doing updates at home, big woop. But hoooollllyyyy shit I must have been doing something illegal! The principal, my boss (the main IT person), the superintendant, anyone that dumbass could call to get me in jail or whatever was done. My boss came, asked what I was doing, I was doing research for a paper and the teacher wasn't my teacher she was just there for something (probably a netbook cart), whats that terminal, its (could have been slackware or ubuntu at that point) doing updates at home, ok, principal asked how it works, showed her the code, superintendant told the teacher to shut the hell up and she was suspended without pay for 3 months.
Because it wasn't IE and it looked different.
Similar story in college with my history teacher seeing ubuntu and telling me to stop playing video games because the function bar was on the side and not the bottom. No one to defend me there I just treated it like a trial with a jury and 4 other students told her to get fucked.
...screw uniformity, if you told me that I have to use apple products and I see that android could do more with what I want to do with it, I would say "At what point do you think I have no say in what I use, give me one fucking reason why I shouldn't use this open environment device which I could use more productively then this closed piece of shit for asshats and brand whores?"
Sorry for the language, just....really don't like forced opinions that amount to a pile of shit.
Hmm, they don't say anything about if they are open source or not, firefox is open source, not sure about the rest cause...I don't care.
The thing is, it's best to use open source products if they fit your needs, this also gives you the flexibility on parameters that you can edit, create and delete yourself. When using closed source products, you never know what's under the hood and could produce potential problems if your not careful.
The problem is not so much with the browser as it is with Flash. Ya know; those 20 critical, zero-day. remote machine total control, patches that happen like every week for flash? Yeah.
IE is not secure as other browsers because while it does receive patches, they are not as fast as the other browsers (due to the reason mentioned above).
Microsoft isn't even continuing with IE, ergo Edge browser. That's kinda a trump card in this situation.
