IE falls below 69% market share, Firefox climbs above 21%
Chicago (IL) – Microsoft was not able to slow the market share loss of its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser in December. IE surrendered more than 1.5 points in December, according to Net Applications, while Firefox, Chrome and Safari posted substantial gains. Over the past 12 months, IE has lost almost 8 points, leaving the browser with the least amount of market share since 1999.
Microsoft plans quick fix for IE
Microsoft is due to issue a patch to fix a security flaw believed to have affected as many as 10,000 websites.
The emergency patch should be available from 1800 GMT on 17 December, Microsoft has said.
The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal passwords.
Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of computer users and the flaw could affect all versions of it.
So far the vulnerability has affected only machines running Internet Explorer 7.
Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet
SAN FRANCISCO - Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday.
(Msnbc.com is a joint Microsoft - NBC Universal venture.)
The flaw lets criminals commandeer victims’ machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc.
Microsoft IE breached by new attacks
There is no question that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has become more secure over time. There’s also no question that with roughly 69 percent of the global browser market, IE remains a meaty target.
It is therefore not surprising that IE is under attack, though perhaps the recent breach of fully-patched IE is surprising, as as The Register reports:
The attacks target a flaw in the way IE handles certain types of data that use the extensible markup language, or XML, format. The bug references already freed memory in the mshtml.dll file. According to IDG News, exploits work about one in three times, and only after a victim has visited a website that serves a malicious piece of javascript.
Creator of Web spots a flaw in Internet Explorer
Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn’t like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.
Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature for Web pages.
A Web image that is encoded as a scalable vector graphic, or SVG, can be resized to fit the computer screen or zoomed into without becoming blocky and losing sharpness, as happens with images encoded as the more traditional “bitmaps.” Maps are one popular use of SVG.
Three More Flaws Found Within Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer users better be aware: three more security flaws have been discovered within their favorite browser, enabling hackers to compromise users’ systems.
The recently-found flaws affect Internet Explorer 5.01, 6.x and 7.x and will allow the execution of arbitrary code. According to Secunia’s report, the first flaw is based on an error in the way HTML, which, with certain layout combinations, can be exploited to corrupt memory via a specially crafted web page.
The second vulnerability is an error in the way the “by” property of an “animateMotion” SVG element is handled can be exploited to corrupt memory via a specially crafted web page assigning other DOM elements to the property.
Microsoft admits to IE problem
Microsoft has admitted that last week’s IE security patches did cripple the browser for some users, but rather than rework the fix, the company has offered a registry hack workaround.
The confirmation and workaround came a week after users installed Security Update MS07-069 on 11 December, and users began reporting they were unable to connect to the Internet with IE or that the browser kept crashing. MS07-069, one of seven bulletins issued on December’s “Patch Tuesday,” fixed four critical vulnerabilities in IE 5.01, IE6 and IE7.
Microsoft Security Update Cripples Internet Explorer
Microsoft Corp. confirms that it is investigating reports that a security update for Internet Explorer issued last week has crippled some users’ ability to get on the Web with the browser.
Users started posting messages to multiple Microsoft support newsgroups almost immediately after Microsoft released the MS07-069 security bulletin on Dec. 11, saying that they were unable to connect to the Internet, either because IE refused to open or because when it did open, it could not reach various sites.
Run IE on your Intel Mac…sort of…with IES4OSX
If you’re a Mac-based web developer, a sysadmin at SomeBigCo, or an Outlook Web Access user, you might find yourself needing to use MS Internet Explorer from time to time. No, not IE for Mac OS X, frozen in amber within Applications folders around the globe; I mean IE for Windows, the hairy scary Active-X enabled browser that for better or worse represents a huge chunk of the web-surfing world.Getting ‘real’ IE on the Mac, up until now, has meant OS emulation (Virtual PC), virtualization (Parallels/VMware), API translation (Wine/CrossOver) or remote access (RDC). Now there’s another option for Intel Mac owners: ies4osx, a Mac port of the ies4linux package. Built on top of the Darwine version of the Wine Win32 API translation layer, ies4osx downloads and installs an official version of IE (you pick from v5, 5.5, 6 or 7) and then runs it inside the X11 environment on your Mac.Via (MacApper)
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