From a Microsoft Exchange partisan:
There is a 0 day exploit of another Microsoft file format that makes your Windows XP system wide-open for hackers if you made some bad decisions. On top of those is still using Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the Internet – what in the world are you thinking? How many times do you have to stab yourself to bleed to death? … The Internet Explorer team needs to be punished, severely, for slacking away and compromising your computer and data security.
From an MS employee:
I think IE is horribly behind the times. When every other browser on the planet that’s worth a damn supports tabbed browsing, it’s just crappy that I still have to have different copies of IE open to have multiple sites open at once.
Both of which are from Microsoft Employees Rage As Internet Explorer Ship Sinks.
And from A Year of Bugs, an article about a browser security test of IE, Opera, and the Mozilla family of browsers:
Actually there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs – between the 12th and the 19th of October – 7 days in total. That means that a fully patched Internet Explorer installation was known to be unsafe for 98% of 2004. And for 200 days (that is 54% of the time) in 2004 there was a worm or virus in the wild exploiting one of those unpatched vulnerabilities.
Heh… I honestly wonder why IE hasn’t implemented tabs yet. So many programs are using that now and you’d think MS would want to be on top of the trends. *rolls eyes*
I read this earlier today as well, its not really surprising when you think of the size of Microsoft as a company. With over 60000 employees (over half working at the Microsoft campus) they are the size of a town with each group being like its own suburb. Each with its own needs and agenda that does not always go go smoothly with the plans of the top brass. IE would seem like an important part of Microsofts overall plan but it is really the redheaded stepchild of the company. Back when they started developing IE Microsoft thought that they could take control of the internet therebye locking people into their OS and applications, well they soon figured out that they could not effect change freely and so continued development of IE seemed like a waste. Thats why its on the backburner, it doesn’t help move their main product anymore. Its all about the OS people.