MS IE on Windows XP
Analysis and Evaluation
Adoption
Internet Explorer (IE) has by far the largest marketshare both oncampus and off. IE makes up 80% of Cougars' Den usage, and 73% of APU Employees use IE to access Outlook Web Access. Statistics for browsers accessing www.apu.edu, show that 89.4% of of campus users use IE, and 95.5% off campus.
General browser statistics from Web Side Story, are the only marketshare stats for which we can perform a trend analysis. They show that from 6/4/04 to 4/29/05 Internet Explorer has dropped from 95.48% to 88.86%. During this same period, Mozilla Firefox has increased marketshare. However, IE will clearly remain the dominant browser for the forseable future.
Application Future
Internet Explorer is a Core of Microsoft platform strategy, and represents a significant investment. Recent changes in direction to release an update (version 7) sooner than bundled with the next version of the Windows operating system, demonstrate that Microsoft is responding to the changing market.
Internet Explorer 7 is currently available in a beta version for testing. Internet Explorer will be part of future updates for Windows XP as well as included with the release of Windows Vista (late 2006). The new version of IE promises protection against phishing, and includes an RSS feed reader. The other stress for IE7 is built in search bars, which will allow users to change their default search programs, and tabbed browsing, both features which have made Firefox popular with advanced users.
Security
Security has been problematic with IE since its inception, because its design exposes more direct access to the operating system. The number of known exploits have been greater than other browsers, however, as stated by our security criteria, the number of bugs is less important than the speed of which they are corrected. It takes Microsoft an average of 43 days to patch a security hole.[ 1] This long window unfortunately allows for malicious software authors to make available exploits. The severety of these security holes often allow for the installation of trojan horse viruses and back door or remote control software. IE security issues have lead to some unprecedented warnings for users to use other browsers, even from the CERT Coordination Center. In December 2004, Penn State told its 80K higher education users not to use Interenet Explorer. [2]
Extending beyond standards has been a problem for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Extensions like Active X, clearly outside of published W3C standards, were a convenience for application developers wanting to bring more native user interfaces to web applications. Maliciously written Visual Basic code could be written to execute malicious code on desktop systems. Microsoft has spent significant resources stepping backwards to close doors left open by this design. Windows XP Service Pack 2 is now considered essential to security on the Windows platform in general, and specifically when running Internet Explorer. Whenever a web browser is tied to the operating system, it is absolutely essential for users to keep their operating system up to date.
Microsoft already improved on earlier versions of IE with the latest service pack. Service Pack 2 stopped certain malicious scripts and pop-ups. Also, the Attachment Execution Service program shows the user file signature of any files being downloaded for greater security, and even allows you to block programs from specific publishers.
Standards Compliance
With IE 5.5 Microsoft was actually ahead of some other browsers regarding standards. Since then, however their have been complaints from web developers and users regarding the rate of adoption of W3C published standards. Since version 5, there have been no significant changes in IE's Trident rendering engine. As a result, as of 2005, IE lags behind in support for standards.
An example is the PNG graphic format, a superior replacement for GIF released in 1995, after Unisys announced that it would be enforcing software patents on the LZW data compression algorithm used in the GIF format. In all that time IE has never supported PNG's correctly, causing many web developers to be frustrated.
On the topic of APU developed web applications, it should be noted that IE requires significantly more time to debug. Javascript issues, image handling, and CSS present a resource drain, and the lack of an included javascript debugger interface (such as Mozilla browsers have) limit troubleshooting ability. For some reason, the IMT Support Desk often is required to step the user through the process of deleting cookies and clearing cache for web applications to work properly with IE. IMT web developers will continue to need to make it a priority to thoroughly test web pages in IE, especially because it is so widely used.
"Although each version of IE has improved standards support, including the introduction of a 'standards-compliant mode' in version 6, the core standards that are used to build web pages (HTML and CSS) are still implemented in an incomplete and incorrect fashion. For example, there is no support for the <abbr> element which is part of the HTML 4.01 standard, and there are bugs in the implementation of float-margins for the CSS1 standard. The Internet Explorer box model bug is one of the best-known bugs in Internet Explorer's implementation of CSS." [3]
Internet Explorer has introduced an array of proprietary extensions to many of the standards, including HTML, CSS and the DOM. This has resulted in a number of web pages that can only be viewed properly using Internet Explorer.
An updated beta 2 featuring improvements in HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.0 is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2005.
Supportability
From an installation and maintenance perpsective, IE is the easiest browser to support on Windows. It is installed with the operating system, and updates are handled via the Windows update utility (which actually uses IE itself). For our student population all critical updates for IE are automatically downloaded periodically via the Cisco Clean Access Agent, installed on all student machines connected to reznet.
Stability is related to the health of the operating system, which on Windows XP is much improved. Unless there is a problem with a 3rd party extension, or spyware etc., Internet Explorer is reliable. Performance of rendering pages perhaps lags a bit behind newer browsers.
Internet Explorer is easy to use, though many users are looking forward to usability enhancements that IE 7 will bring, such as a cleaner, more simple design and tabbed browsing. Common extensions and addons supporting multimedia and other formats are widely available. The only place where IE falls behind in supportability, is the rate at which problems are resolved. Bug fixes are infrequent, and additional features have been lacking for some time. Obviously, security issues play a factor in supportability as well.
Help is built into Windows, and community support forums and newsgroups are available for advanced users. Otherwise, email support is be $35 per incident.
1. http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,100541,00.html
2. http://chronicle.com/free/2004/12/2004121001n.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Internet_Explorer
