Microsoft Says Firefox Not A Threat To Ie

[kabal1234]

Microsoft says Firefox not a threat to IE

Published: November 11, 2004, 10:54 AM PST

By Munir Kotadia

Special to CNET News.com

Just days after the launch of open-source browser Firefox 1.0, 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, Microsoft's security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any other browser.

"Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don't think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there," English said.

Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, agreed, saying he does not believe IE's market share is under attack following the recent high-profile debut of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the competitive threat posed by Firefox, he doesn't see it as a problem.

"I'm not sure that that is the reality. 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 features already offered by Microsoft's browser.

"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said.

Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype 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 not. It is only 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 features that our customers don't use.

"If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."

English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important 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 seriously. 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 activity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual--such as a keystroke-logging program.

"Internally, we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zero attacks, and we have more and more of our customers--particularly in the university sector--deploying the Cisco Secure Agent," Fowler said.

[Danbkk]

If they don't think it is a threat why do the <deleted> put this on msn search when you click 'submit a site' using Firefox

Please Upgrade Your Browser

You are using: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

To view this site you must use:

Microsoft® Internet Explorer or Netscape® Navigator 4.0 or higher

Click here to find the latest free browser from Microsoft

[Highwayman]

While l think most people who try Firefox like it, there are a lot of people who just want something like IE that works out of the box. Even having to download Firefox is too much trouble for some people. I have some friends who work in high paying IT jobs and they won't even consider trying Firefox as they say they just don't have the time. While l like to play around with settings to tweak programs that l use, there are many people who cannot be bothered. So long as IE comes ready to use with Windows, Firefox will remain a niche product, even if it's way better.

I have to say l'm surprised by the comments of Steve Vamos, the MS MD. Not even trying the opposition product seems very short sighted, but the IT people l mentioned before are a bit like that, not interested in any products but their own.

The comments of English that IE users don't want tab browsing are also odd. Everyone l've ever shown tabbed browsing to thinks it's great, and most go on to use Firefox or at least another browser that has tabs. Once you've used them there's no going back.

As for security problems, all l will say is that running Ad-aware and Spybot produce very different results. When you use IE a lot of problems get picked up, but when you do a scan after using Firefox there are hardly any. I guess MS have a different definition of security to Mozilla.

[Wash]

I have MSIE, Opera, Firefox, and NetCaptor all running on my computer and prefer NetCaptor to all of them.

Opera is a non issue since they are even more calcified than is Microsoft that what they have is best for you and won't consider other needed inclusions. Firefox is not able to display all pages properly. That leaves MSIE which does display almost all pages properly without tabs. So by adding NetCaptor to MSIE you have the best of all worlds since it simply adds tabs to the MSIE browser plus some other features.

I do not belive Firefox will become as dominent a player as all the hype expects since many judges of MSIE simply take up the mantle because it is popular to knock Microsoft. The fact is that MSIE has security problems to no greater extent and likely much less extent than other browsers. The problem is that maliciousness can be more richly recognized if you attack the dominant player.

I think Microsoft is taking a very agressive posture on getting to the bottom of the crazy disruptors and appreciate the efforts to make the web better. I fear if companies like Microsoft do not take the lead on this aspect of the problem the internet will become so chaotic with virus, torjan and junk mail that it will become useless.

So I say Upgrade your software to latest version and hope that Microsoft will keep up the effort to make the web what it was intended to be all the time. It is beyond my ability to understand why the attackee is chastised when all the time it is the attacker that we should be upset with.

My 2 cents worth.

[Danbkk]

Firefox is not able to display all pages properly.  That leaves MSIE which does display almost all pages properly

Technically not true. Its the other way round!

MSIE ignores many of the the W3C web standards and renders pages as it see fit. The problem is some web designers only test with IE, so when their incorrect code looks OK in IE, they assume it is correct. When the page is correctly rendered in Firefox or Opera it may not look how the author intended.

This is at best pretty incompetent at worst a cynical ploy by MS to try to dominate the browser market.

I think Microsoft is taking a very agressive posture on getting to the bottom of the crazy disruptors and appreciate the efforts to make the web better

Microsofts non conformance actually holds the internet back considerably, rendering new technologies like CSS positioning almost unusble due to Microsofts buggy interpretation.

My 2 pence worth

[Highwayman]

So by adding NetCaptor to MSIE you have the best of all worlds since it simply adds tabs to the MSIE browser plus some other features.

Wash, l think l saw you mention NetCaptor before on ThaiVisa. The links l found tell me that it costs $29.95 (1250 baht) after the free trial. That's a lot to pay just to add tabs that come standard with many other free browsers such as Firefox and Avant. MS have such a strangle hold on the market that they think they can just sit back and everyone will use their products anyway. Looking at one download site recently, so many MS products such as IE were 1-2 years old. If they were perfect then you could understand it, but no product is that good these days that it can have all development shelved, which is what MS have done up until recently with IE.

Anti IE hype alone isn't enough to make people change to Firefox. People change because it is a very good browser, quick and very customisable. The constant stream of IE security patches doesn't do Firefox any harm at all either.

[Crushdepth]

To me there's no doubt that Firefox is a superior product, in fact I think Microsoft probably finds it *embarrasingly* superior given the resources at their disposal. Unfortunately I can't see IE being displaced due to the simple fact that it is bundled with windows.

Not all is lost though. Microsoft is very good at stealing other people's ideas and I have no doubt that Firefox will drive many improvements in the next iteration of IE. So even IE users will benefit, eventually.

[kabal1234]

Not all is lost though. Microsoft is very good at stealing other people's ideas and I have no doubt that Firefox will drive many improvements in the next iteration of IE. So even IE users will benefit, eventually.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not forgetting the ideas other browsers have (I'll say borrowed) from IE. As you say, I think this is a healthy thing as in the end all users will get what they want regardless of what browser they use. As consumers we all win, no matter how much we like to complain.

[Sulaphat]

M$IE will eventually adopt most/all of the features that make Firefox a better browser, except perhaps the program's small size.

What will prevent Firefox and other competitors from overtaking M$IE is the fact that any application requiring the presence of a web browser in order to operate properly will probably be written to use M$IE, not its competitors.