Talk:Common criticisms of Internet Explorer

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[edit] Previous Discussion

The Criticisms of Internet Explorer article came into existence in May 2005, and is intended to eventually provide a neutral, concise, yet thorough summary of the criticism that has been heaped upon the Internet Explorer web browser in recent years.

I would like to iterate that the critics are primarly fire fox or non-ie users and thus, it is biased. I will accept the external link oppinions and only those oppinions.

The article's content was separated from its previous home in the Criticisms section of the main article, where it was growing excessively lengthy and where it had been the subject of much debate. The debate was over specific technical issues mentioned in the content, as well as the arguably less-than-neutral way in which topics were often framed.

Please note that relevant discussion that occurred prior to the creation of this article was not moved from Talk:Internet Explorer. When starting a new discussion thread here, please check the following pages to see if there was prior discussion of the topic:

  • Talk:Internet Explorer - current discussion
  • Archive 1: Discussion prior to January 30, 2005 - topics covered include market dominance; IE for Unix; Mozilla evangelism; Mac OS X image caption; standards; IE features; competing browsers; removal of IE; Microsoft's bug database; edit wars; cost of IE; anti-IE CERT advisory; misc NPOV issues
  • Archive 2: Discussion prior to July 9, 2005 - topics covered include NPOV issues; JavaScript; Microsoft AntiSpyware; Embrace, Extend and Extinguish and vendor lock-in; presence of Firefox-related content; BHOs; web standards and degrees of conformance; languages; article headings & organization; PNG; peer review and featured article submissions; Sandbox and Chrome; the criticism section; impact of Firefox advocacy on IE's decline; ActiveX and eBay

If there is prior discussion, please continue it here on Talk:Criticisms of Internet Explorer, not on the old page. — mjb 05:48, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cause I want to

actually nvm. Whole page is but a series of uncited rants by FF users.

[edit] Digest Auth

Something about its messed handling of digest auth would be nice Tc1415 14:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General Comments

It's possible to summarize the article by saying "IE sucks." CoolGuy 19:44, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

This would do well to demonstrate the ill-informed standpoint of the anti-IE, pro-OSS zealot. Go ahead --Beachy 17:07, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
How is it "pro-OSS zealotry" when people using non-OSS browsers (Opera for example) think "IE sucks" too?
How is it "pro-OSS zealotry" when one the engineers who created IE switch to Firefox and says "IE sucks now"? -- Anon 11:39, 21 Sep 2005 (UTC)
I guess you are trying to say that not everyone who is anti-IE is pro-OSS. Fair enough. But the IE articles here on Wikipedia have a long history of being vandalized by people with an agenda, and more often than not, these people valiantly uphold the stereotypes that Beachy made reference to.
You also undermine your argument by misquoting an article that you most likely read about on slashdot, whose collective anti-MS, pro-OSS bias is unparalleled. And for some reason you didn't want to mention that the engineer in question criticizes Firefox in his article, or that he switched mainly out of disappointment in IE's feature lag rather than for its security, standards support or general usability. He was not vitriolic or particularly scathing of IE at all — "IE sucks now" is your embellishment, not a quote he made. — mjb 21:01, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Firefox ok, Opera not?

Why is a link to a Firefox-promoting article all right but one to an Opera promoting not? The latter was removed promptly by Minghong. Yet the "Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer", "Internet Explorer Is Too Dangerous to Keep Using", "How to Protect Yourself From Vandals, Viruses If You Use Windows" and "Securing Microsoft Windows (for Home and Small Business Users)", articles which all recommend / promote Firefox and Firefox only, are ok to link to!?

I'd prefer removing all browser-specific links instead of adding more browser. I.e. get rid of footnotes 12-15.


Comment for "Firefox ok, Opera not?": I agree. The footnotes link to a glowing Firefox review by a journalist who is known to be an eager Firefox fan, but linking to Opera is not allowed? Look at secunia.com, and you will see that Opera has no known unpatched vulnerabilities, while Firefox has several. If Firefox is supposed to be an example of excellent security, why isn't Opera?
I'm sorry but from the title, it was browser-specific. Hence the link was removed. That edit was not a biase against anything. And yes I agree this article needs some cleanups to remove unnecessary references to other browser (aka non-IE browser promotion). --minghong 6 July 2005 16:44 (UTC)

[edit] Win XP sp2 only available for Win XP

Do we really need to assume people are that stupid? —User:ACupOfCoffee@ 18:56, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I changed the wording on this to "Note that the security features introduced with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1) are not available for earlier versions of Windows, including Windows 9x, NT and 2000." Does that sound better to you? Warrens 19:49, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article changes

I've been working on a lot of changes and improvements to the article, to help improve the overall encyclopedic value of the article.

Most significantly, I'm converting the article to use REF tags for references, rather than inline external references. This brings us much more in line with WP:CITE. I'm also using the cquote quoting style, which looks pretty nice, and gets those important quotes into a position of better readability.

Other things I've done:

  • Removed the SecurityFocus vulnerability count; their web site doesn't really give us any easy way of seeing how many outstanding vulnerabilities there are, so the number "27" that was previously in the article was not easily verifiable. Secunia is a respected source, it should stand well on its own.
  • Clarified that the vulnerability that led to Download.ject was specific to IIS 5. Also removed two of the three external links associated with the subject; one was an invalid URL that didn't point to relevant information, and the other contained a lot of technical detail about the virus, which is suitable for the article on the virus itself, but not this one.
  • Added information about UAC and Protected-IE features in Vista.
  • Added a counter-balance to the information about Apache having fewer vulnerabilities than IIS. It's not true anymore! It certainly was the case prior to IIS6's release, but it isn't now. I've added Secunia references demonstrating this.
  • Removed the link to David Wheeler's paper on how to secure Windows. Issues of his being unabashedly pro-Linux aside, there are a lot of technical faults in his paper, largely because information he leans on is years out of date. Apart from that, the paper covers securing many aspects of Windows, and only a small portion is given to Internet Explorer.
  • Removed the term "non-standard" from the description of ActiveX. The ubiquity of ActiveX makes it "standard" in one literal definition of the word, so to describe it as "non-standard" isn't exactly correct. I rewrote the sentence as "ActiveX controls are also Windows-specific applications and are not portable to non-Windows platforms without significant effort.", which I feel is a pretty accurate assessment.
  • In some places where a person or source is cited, I've noted what year it's from. This will help lend some real context to what's being said.
  • The reference for the book "Malicious Mobile Code" has been changed from a Groklaw web link to a proper book citation.
  • I expanded a couple of quotations to balance things out a bit more.
  • I've found that there were a number of mis-represented dates as well, I'm fixing these as best I can.

... and that's just in the "Security" section of the article, phew! I'll be working on this for a while longer; I'll update this with further changes I've made. Warrens 04:07, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


The cartoon style quotation marks are unnecessarily showy, IMO.

[edit] Acid 2 Test

Microsoft has publicly stated that the next version of Internet Explorer (version 7) will not pass the Acid 2 test. Could we elaborate on this?

See the Acid 2 page for the lowdown.

[edit] 5 years of development, no results

Perhaps a mention of the fact that it has taken Microsoft 5 years to add PNG alpha support, tabs, and pretty much nothing else, is needed? They haven't done anything (besides PNG) to ease the ridiculous amounts of extra code needed to make a standards-compliant site work in IE. PNG support and tabs seem like they would take a week to implement and a couple months to test, which means the IE team has been standing around with their heads up their asses for 5 years. Pitiful. I'd add it myself but I could never write about this in an NPOV way. - Noclip 12:36, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Because Internet Explorer 7 has no problems with PNG and JPG, shouldn't we delete that part about nonsense of Internet Explorer not supporting png?

The reason why it takes so long for MS to develop something for IE is prioritization. In the field of computers, .NET is the highest priority, then Windows, then Office then many many others and then comes IE. Jancikotuc 18:10, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

This large article contains mostly descriptions of things that should be references in the main Internet Explorer#Criticisms article. Criticisms by definition are opinions and should have no place in Wikipedia. Whatever is legitimate in this article should be distilled and merged with the Criticisms section in the main article, which is already quite detailed. GreyWyvern 15:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that all the Cricitism pages (IE, Opera, Firefox) should be deleted, they are not Encyclopedic. Things that can be merged should be merged in the general article (not under a "Criticism" header). That's my 2 cents on the subject. -- AdrianTM 22:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
If the article only contained statements such as, "Joe Blog doesn't like Microsoft," I would agree with you. However, the criticism pages for IE, Opera, Firefox, etc, point out factual shortcomings and contain valuable information for web designers and web users alike. --Dbolton 17:14, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Much of the information on this page seems out of date. Some of it is even inaccurate. For example, the claims that IE's rendering engine has not had any major changes since version 5. Even if you discount the recently released IE7, IE6 had significant rendering changes, such as fixing the faulty box model rendering of IE5 in standards mode. Before this information gets merged, i'd suggest a lot of changes... 12.207.87.61 20:21, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dumb error message: "The Page Cannot Be Displayed"

That message is so annoying that Internet Explorer is now notorius for it! No wonder I'm now using Firefox for all my internet browsing needs... and on a Mac, too! To think I actually used to use Internet Explorer back when we first got our old Windoze XP machine. Heck, I actually liked Micro$oft! But then I realized how bad it was (damn you pop-ups! DAMN YOU!!!) I got Firefox (for Windoze) and later an Apple MacBook (The white one, not the black one. I highly recommend it for those old Windoze users who would like to make "the switch") and Firefox for that. I just couldn't get into Safari! Share your Firefox/Non-IE stories, please.

This is not a forum. However, even some web servers mimic the IE's error message... Yuk, you can even get with Opera under Linux, e.g. if you mistype a website URL on such server.

[edit] The IE blink when changing page

I have not seen any discussion of the irritating feature of IE - including the latest version - whereby whenever there is a change of page the screen blinks for a noticable period of time, even when most of the page content is unchanged. This does not happen with Firefox and some other browsers. Why is this, and why has it not been addressed in the latest IE version?

Geoff97 22:02, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I doubt that could be considered an Encyclopedic fact. Remember that this is an Encyclopedia not a forum where to complain about I don't know what obscure problem with your browser. We also need to avoid original research. -- AdrianTM 10:41, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

You are right. Point taken. Geoff97 19:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IE7 tabbing

Actually the user can define wherether when opened another tab, it has to display a blank page or the homepage in IE as of IE 7.0 RC1. So i had to delete the following message as inaccurate: ===IE7 tabbing=== While beta versions of IE7 include a useful feature for opening multiple web pages in a "tabbed" layout the "open new tab" command opens a blank page rather than the default startup page

Illuminati 23:56, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hoaxes

To describe this section as OR is a misunderstanding of that policy. The source contains crticism and highlighting this is perfectly OK. TerriersFan 21:21, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I motivated my revert this way: I don't think "hoaxes" is encyclopedic material, also you'd have problems proving that hoaxes represent a form of criticsm. -- AdrianTM 21:27, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
The text of the hoax manifestly contains criticisms. Whilst the hoax may not be encyclopaedic the concept of using a hoax website as a form of criticism certainly is. TerriersFan 21:43, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Let's wait for a 3rd opinion on this issue, I remain at my opinion that's not something encyclopedic and a hoax is a hoax, not a criticism. -- AdrianTM 23:07, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
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