Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out The Saint Email This Print This View My Personal Library Frontside October 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 10 Page(s) 16-17 in print issue Add To My Personal Library The Saint Vista Explorer 8.0 by Alex St. John Alex St. John was one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology. He is the subject of the book “Renegades Of The Empire” about the creation of DirectX and Chromeffects, an early effort by Microsoft to create a multi-media browser. Today Alex is President and CEO of WildTangent Inc., a technology company devoted to delivering CD-ROM quality entertainment content over the Web. After seeing Microsoft butcher Vista, I wrote a column claiming that I would not be surprised if Microsoft could never pull off a major OS release again. In my own defense, I would point out that history shows few examples of companies who lose their way that badly and ever recover, but then Microsoft has always been an exceptional company. After using Windows 7, I had to pinch myself and ask where I went wrong. It was like an entirely different corporate mentality and culture had taken over Microsoft OS design. I contacted some old friends at the empire and asked what had happened. Apparently, after the Vista debacle, Microsoft had a major housecleaning. They purged the old guard, and a new generation of up-and-coming executives took over leadership of Windows and managed to reestablish a consumer-centric focus on usability, leanness, stability, compatibility, and security. Don’t get me wrong, although I have a list of things I’d love to see done better in Windows, it’s great to see an overall shift in focus from the egocentric “What’s best for us is what’s best for you!” approach to OS design demonstrated in Vista to the humbler, more service-centric “We’re going to just make everything work and try to stay out of your way” philosophy that seems to embody Windows 7. Of course, if everything was right in the world, I’d have very little to write about, but fortunately for me the humility memo did not reach all of Microsoft’s product groups. Take IE 8, for example, which is the subject of an enormous Microsoft marketing push. (Note: If you have to spend a lot of money marketing a free, electronically distributed upgrade to the most widely used browser on the Internet to get people to try it, there must be something seriously wrong with it!) Microsoft claims the product is “safer, faster, and easier to use.” So what’s the very first thing Microsoft tells you about how great IE 8 is when you visit the download page for it? “Install Windows Internet Explorer 8, MSN Toolbar, and Microsoft Silverlight in one click.” Now there’s a compelling value proposition. For reasons I don’t understand, I can get IE8 together with a toolbar that will enable Microsoft to track my browsing behavior and sell advertising, bundled with a technology nobody uses that will help Microsoft kill Adobe Flash. What’s in this for me? Oh wait, way down in the lower-left corner of the page in small print, it says: “Search smarter, work faster, and browse more safely, all within a familiar environment.” They just sort of threw that stuff in at the bottom in case getting a free MSN toolbar and Silverlight was not a sufficiently compelling reason to upgrade. After some digging, I found a download page that didn’t bundle that other . . . what did Microsoft call it in when referring to other peoples’ Internet applications shipping with Vista? Oh yes, crapware. This was the featured ad on the IE8 download page (right). You can’t make this stuff up. I thought we were all getting fat? I’ll check . . . . America is home to the most obese people in the world. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), obesity in adults has increased by 60% within the past 20 years, and obesity in children has tripled in the past 30 years. A staggering 33% of American adults are obese, and obesity-related deaths have climbed to more than 300,000 a year, second only to tobacco-related deaths. In other words, IE8 is so useless to me that Microsoft’s best idea for a guilt trip to get me to download it anyway is to threaten to starve obese children if we persist in using IE7? By “struggle” do they mean it’s hard to drag our fat butts away from World of Warcraft long enough to reach the refrigerator? Okay, I’m digressing. So, I finally managed to download IE 8 without all the other crapware and got it installed and thought, “So let’s see what Microsoft means by faster, safer, and more user-friendly.” So the FIRST user experience in IE8 is a dialog box that obstructs me from quickly getting online to tell me how IE8 “helps” me to use the Internet faster. The dialog doesn’t actually ask me a question (which makes it just a pop-up ad) but offers Next and Ask Me Later buttons as options to escape the dialog. As it turns out, neither option is an appealing one. If you click Next, thinking there is some essential installation step you’ve missed thus far, you are mistaken. Microsoft just wants to take you on a little tour of IE8 and try to trick you into replacing your default search provider with Microsoft’s. If you click Ask Me Later, you can go straight to browsing the Web with your default search provider and favorites in place and unmolested; however, IE8 will continue to display this obnoxious dialog every time you launch it until you get fed up, click Next, and accidentally switch your search provider away from Google. That dialog alone spoils all pretentions IE8 had at being faster or user-friendly; if they couldn’t figure out that doing something that obnoxious immediately on first launch was unacceptable, what hope can there be for the rest of the product? Just out of curiosity, what feature could they have put in IE8 that everybody wants and loves about Firefox, actually makes surfing faster, and could have provided a great opportunity to offer better security? How about adding a download manager? I guess those engineers were too busy working on the MSN toolbar or Silverlight to get that feature done in time for IE 4, 5, 6, 7, or even 8! I know, I’m being a little silly. I’m sure there is some great stuff in IE8; let’s go back to the download page and read about it from Microsoft. We’ll just click the “Speed and ease in the real world: Learn how Internet Explorer 8 delivers the best web experience” link (tinyurl.com/chwfke). Bear with me now, I’m using IE8 on the IE8 download page . . . are you ready for this? Pop! Apparently, delivering the best Web experience didn’t include shipping Adobe Acrobat or Macromedia Flash with IE8! If I had the space, I’d walk everyone through the process I went through to download and install Adobe Acrobat just so I could read Microsoft’s treatise on why IE8 delivers the best Web experience. It’s a damn funny read in that context. Follow that laugh by clicking the “Find out which browser protects against more socially engineered malware” link (nsslabs.com/anti-malware/browser-security). Not surprisingly, the report concludes that IE8 is superior at preventing malware downloads, which it claims are responsible for 54% of malware infections. IE8 appears to accomplish this brilliant security feat by consistently obstructing all downloads, including Adobe Acrobat, which they require for reading their own reports! Maybe people would be less inclined to download random Internet plug-ins if the ones they used commonly were already included with the browser? The NSS Labs study Microsoft directs you to is a great read for the critical thinkers out there. It raises many more questions about IE 8 security than it answers. For example, the study doesn’t mention who funded it, and NSS Labs is a commercial enterprise. The study points out that IE7 was the worst-performing browser at blocking malware attacks, suggesting that people would be well-advised to upgrade their browser to almost anything else immediately. Given the fact that Microsoft claimed security leadership with IE7 (technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512583.aspx), these folks should also ask themselves why they should trust Microsoft an eighth time. Also note that the report is selectively titled: “Socially engineered Malware Protection Comparative Test Results.” What is socially engineered malware? Well, you have to read between the lines a little bit, but the study does expressly explain that “Exploits that install malware without the user being aware are not included in this study.” Now let me get this straight . . . this study is not a survey of actual browser security vulnerabilities, it’s a study of which browsers are most effective at discouraging stupid people from deliberately installing malware on their own machines after IE8 has just finished confusing them about whether they can trust a download from, say, Adobe? For one last great piece of irony, the big feature in IE8 is a porn browsing mode that prevents your spouse or parents from seeing where you’ve been surfing—and accidentally downloading malware instead of porn. I shouldn’t even have to point out that most malware is distributed via porn sites and downloads targeting children, or that IE8 doesn’t work well with Vista’s broken parental control system (www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=479453&publicationSubCategoryId=90). I think I just guessed which product group all the Microsoft folks who screwed up Vista wound up in after the company’s big housecleaning. Send your feedback to thesaint@cpumag.com Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. 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