Miscellaneous > Applications

Internet Explorer is NOT a webbrowser

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Orethrius:
Both valid points: indeed, Internet Explorer attempts to embrace, extend, and extinguish new standards, but what makes a good "web browser" really depends on the context of usage.  

Calum, +1 for reading my thoughts and speaking them.  ;)

muzzy:
So, it's more like redefining the "Web" rather than redefining "Web browser" now? With the standards and so on, are you saying that old web pages are not part of the web if they don't comply to the standards? Or perhaps, back in the old days when blink tag wasn't in the specification, the pages using it weren't actually web pages?

Saying IE is not a web browser is just ridiculous, it's like saying that notepad is not a text editor. Yeah, notepad isn't, it's just a wrapper over EDIT control that can save and load files! It's not standards compliant either, try to save as UTF-8 and you'll get a BOM-marker in the beginning, which is really really fishy! That wasn't in any standards back when it was implemented, so notepad isn't really a text editor! Getting my point?

Orethrius:

--- Quote from: muzzy ---So, it's more like redefining the "Web" rather than redefining "Web browser" now? With the standards and so on, are you saying that old web pages are not part of the web if they don't comply to the standards? Or perhaps, back in the old days when blink tag wasn't in the specification, the pages using it weren't actually web pages?

Saying IE is not a web browser is just ridiculous, it's like saying that notepad is not a text editor. Yeah, notepad isn't, it's just a wrapper over EDIT control that can save and load files! It's not standards compliant either, try to save as UTF-8 and you'll get a BOM-marker in the beginning, which is really really fishy! That wasn't in any standards back when it was implemented, so notepad isn't really a text editor! Getting my point?
--- End quote ---

Wow, you assumed a LOT from so very little.  That's probably what I like best about you.  Yes, technically, web pages that are non-standards compliant ARE NOT part of the web - at least not the parts that are non-compliant.  They cannot be shown equivalently in all browsers, and thus are only part of a limited browser market.  That being said, the purist in me still thinks tags were a bad idea.  :D  Additionally, don't go ragging on , it got adopted after all.  Terrible idea, but it DID get adopted.


--- Quote ---Saying IE is not a web browser is just ridiculous, it's like saying that notepad is not a text editor.
--- End quote ---

I agree wholeheartedly.  Now find the part where any of us actually SAID that.  See you in a decade.


--- Quote ---Yeah, notepad isn't, it's just a wrapper over EDIT control that can save and load files! It's not standards compliant either, try to save as UTF-8 and you'll get a BOM-marker in the beginning, which is really really fishy! That wasn't in any standards back when it was implemented, so notepad isn't really a text editor! Getting my point?
--- End quote ---

If your point is that Notepad is IN NO WAY related to any functionality of Internet Explorer - unless you count the versatility to be capable of authoring raw pagecode, which ANY decent text-ed can do - then yes, you've made that abundantly clear, albeit in a roundabout manner.  By the way, I thought you were supposed to be the defender of Microsoft?  Where did you come up with the idea to attack what is - quite possibly - their best-coded application?

muzzy:
MrX and Annorax seem to believe IE is not a web browser, that was the initial topic of the discussion anyway and that's what I was discussing. I gave the example of blink tag to counter the notion that netscape complied to standards of its time (as claimed by Annorax), and the notepad example to show how ridiculous it is to use strict standards compliance as a measure to determine if an application is something or not. There are cases where you can take such a stance, but the web has always been a loose platform, with browsers implementing their own features to "extend" things.

You also missed my point with notepad. My analogy was with standards compliance, i.e. how notepad cannot be considered a text editor since the utf-8 saving didn't quite comply with standards when notepad was developed. Go save an utf-8 file with notepad and open it in hex editor, you should see U+FEFF in the beginning (encoded in hex as EF BB BF in utf-8) which really shouldn't be there. Microsoft is using that to mark files as UTF-8, and this has caused a lot of issues with other applications that don't expect them. That character is considered a zero-width non-breaking space, and typically called a "byte order marker".

So, since they implement this hack, a lot of software has been rewritten and standards redefined to explicitly support this, see XML and expat crashes for an example. However, do you think that this issue means notepad is not a text editor at all? I don't know anyone who would make such a claim. Similarly, I didn't think anyone would consider IE to not be a web browser just because it implements some things in funny, sometimes non-standard ways.

Aloone_Jonez:
That a side muzzy, if Microsoft Internet Exploer is such a secure browser then why did united States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), recommend to switch to an alternative browser?


--- Quote ---Use a different web browser

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular, proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. These technologies are implemented in operating system libraries that are used by IE and many other programs to provide web browser functionality. IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an attacker significant access to the operating system.

It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when viewing untrusted HTML documents (e.g., web sites, HTML email messages). Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as proprietary DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control (WebOC), or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).
--- End quote ---


By the way this isn't that old - only 13th October 2004, and I think they know a lot more about computer security than you do. :p

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