News Microsoft to secure IE for XP only

Using '98, ME or a flavour of W2K? Would you like a secure, fully upto date patched version of IE? Yes? Tough. The man from Redmond, he say NO. This from news.com:

If you're one of about 200 million people using older versions of Windows and you want the latest security enhancements to Internet Explorer, get your credit card ready.

Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft's IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the OS costs $199.

That, say analysts, is a steep price to pay to secure a browser that swept the market as a free, standalone product.

More here

 

This is how Mircrosoft controls/makes money is it not. They get to force people to do the two things they like most, give them money, and willingly sacrifice that little bit of freedom.

 

Or we make the march now for:
GOOGLEOWSER that is to say, other browsers. I'll be making a trip to my former highschool this week to inform them of firefox. (They still run 2k because they don't have the money to upgrade every computer in the district... talking thousands or tens of thousands of computers...)

 

with M$ like this more and more people will flock to the mozilla camp

 

Good thing too. Firefox r0x0rz j00r b0x0rz.

 

Especially with RSS feed bookmarks!

- H.

 

Much as it annoys people, it's the way of the world. Should I demand AMD continue to produce a CPU for my 2-year old motherboard? It won't take anything after Palamino. Or mobos continue to support the PC133 RAM I bought? Yamaha have no XP driver for my soundcard, HP only a half-assed one for the old printer.

One major grouse at MS was that legacy software support meant they were piling up an ever-more shaky building on old foundations. Now they decide to cut out some half-dead timber they get flak from the other side.

Anyone with valuable data to protect will be prepared to spend serious money, never mind the cost of upgrading their OS every few years. The rest of us should worry more about a lightning strike messing us up.

 

Yay IE7!!!! i will download the day it comes available

 

You sure it will be downloadable? There have been enough rumours that it'll only be available as part of Longhorn with no separate download version. I've no idea if Microsoft have changed that plan or not, but why continue using IE anyway? Change your browser now, and use IE only when it's necessary.

 

There's a difference between supporting your program which is less than 5 years old (and basically the same as the new version), and changing your product. The thing about this is that 2k and XP are the same thing! It's rediculous to say they'll support XP but not 2K. Even more rediculous to say that new versions of IE will not even operate on 2K. 9x I can understand because it's a slightly different beast, but xp vs 2k is rediculous IMO.

 

I dual boot with the latest build of LH and it was IE6 if I'm not mistaken. I will check for you. And i think i will stick with IE because it is so superior to that fire fox thing.

Edit: WTF happened in my Sig? Someone changed my case and HDD size!!!

 

Er LOL?!?!

 

Superior in the way that is an outdated peice of rubbish that has just had patch after patch added to it?

 

And what about the people still using NT "because it ain't broke so why fix it?". There are hundreds of Universities and Corporations all around the world who refuse to upgrade because they can't afford it and don't really need to when NT (or 2000) do everything they need already. Microsoft withdraws all support eventually, unfortunately for them.

I hope that's a legal version of Longhorn you're running there

IE is not superior, get over yourself. It's losing ground to the better alternatives (Safari, Firefox, Opera) day by day, as people wise up to how crap and insecure it really is.

 

Mozilla firefox here I come.

 

Safari, Firefox, Opera are not superior, get over yourself. they're all slow, cant render complicated web content correctly, they have a larger memory footprint. ive yet to see any of em highlight clicked links without having to refresh. they feel clunky. you cant highlight text correctly in them. mozilla seems to make a broadband connection crawl at campus. opera doesn't load images correctly on low bandwidth dial-up. none of them can handle java right. they dont support neat features like fixed backgrounds correctly. day by day more and more people are getting a crappier non-microsoft piece of software becuase its fashionable to hate "micro$oft".

 

When did you last use firefox huh?
IMHO it has better page rendering than IE. And a really neat feature Find As You Type. Then it has the tab system.
Just to mention a few.
Only one bad for firefox i haven't found a spelling checker for it yet like ieSpell.

EDIT: Found a spell checker called Spell Bound... It's more advanced then ieSpell.

 

Opera, Firefox and Safari are leaps and bounds greater than IE. The most obvious thing about all of them is that you don't get spyware and other such rubbish when you use them.

They are visibly faster at loading pages.

Just becasue there are some compatabilty issues with them doesn't mean it is a crap browser. It's crap websites that don't work in anything but IE. If people coded the websites better there would be no compatabilty issues.

And then there all the extra features that come with them. Mouse gestures are incredibly useful once you start using them. Built in e-mail, IRC, password managers, tabbed browsing and countless others with other add-ons always being made.

 

The latest Firefox version is 0.9.3 (still Alpha), and IE is about 6.0.2800.1106 (mine is..not that I ever use it.)

Firefox > IE^80. Alpha software from amature programmers beating ten-year-old software from some of the worlds best programmers. Go figure .

 

Check out your history. In the beginning was Mozilla, and it begat Netscape, which went to the Dark Side with AOL but lost the Great Browser War to the White Mage IE. But from the ashes arose Phoenix, later known as Firebird, later changed to Firefox for legal reasons.

Hardly "amateurs", and the core team are funded by supporters.

Firefox is the browser equivalent to Linux, very appealling to the geek but hardly user-friendly to the average joe. And pretty damn useless until you've added a few extensions, installed Java, Flash, Quicktime, etc, configured it to suit your needs and re-installed a few times when things don't work.

If you doubt me, check out the massive number of problem posts at the Support forums

That said, I use it 98% of the time. But the other 2%, it won't get the job done on a site where IE will.

If hackers were nice people, we wouldn't need security patches. It won't happen in either case. But IE is more error-tolerant and copes with HTML4.0- pages better.

You'll also notice FF 1.0PR (or 0.1, they seem unsure) fixes several security holes from earlier versions, so your 0.9.3 isn't as secure as you may think...