csua.org/u/9wy -> news.com.com/Microsoft+says+Firefox+not+a+threat+to+IE/2100-1032_3-5448719.html
Just days after the launch of open-source browser Firefox 10, Microsoft executives defended Internet Explorer, saying it is no less secure than any other browser and doesn't lack any important features. At a security roundtable discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Ben English, M icrosoft's security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any othe r browser. "Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don't thin k that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out t here," English said.
compet itive threat posed by Firefox, he doesn't see it as a problem. I have seen comments around that, but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said . Instead, Vamos said, consumers need to be educated about all the featu res already offered by Microsoft's browser. "We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that ar e in IE," he said. Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hyp e surrounding the open-source movement and that if Microsoft's customers wanted new features, they would have told the company about it. "I don't agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don't have, that feature is important," he said. It is o nly important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don't have. We have plenty of featu res that our customers don't use. "If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be adde d, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that respond s pretty quickly and effectively to that."
Digital agenda English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not importan t to IE users. "I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriousl y If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team." Ross Fowler, managing director of Cisco Systems Australia and New Zealand , said the networking giant uses IE internally but only after deploying Cisco's Secure Agent, which is a desktop utility that monitors all activ ity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual--such as a keystro ke-logging program. "Internally, we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zer o attacks, and we have more and more of our customers--particularly in t he university sector--deploying the Cisco Secure Agent," Fowler said.
|
http://csua.com/feed/