Category: Internet Explorer

High-security web certificates arrive

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, and today I got another reminder when I went to eBay to see how much I could get for a Dell PowerEdge 600SC server:

Ebay_green_cert

In IE7, the Address bar turns green to indicate that the secure connection is backed up by an “extended validation” certificate from a trusted certification authority (in this case, Verisign). So far, I’ve seen these certificates at PayPal and eBay, both of which are prime targets for phishing attacks.

When these certificates were announced, there was a bit of a brouhaha about how they would turn mom and pop retail outlets into second-class citizens. But organized criminals aren’t aggressively attacking those little sites; they’re going after the big names. So this approach makes sense. (Not only that, but many small businesses use PayPal or eBay stores for payment and order processing, which means they get the enhanced security without having to pay for an expensive certificate.)

Have you seen these certificates anywhere else?

Update: If you’re running IE7 on Windows XP, you’ll need to go to Windows Update and get the Root Certificates update (in the Optional section) before this feature will work.

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Worst. Review. Ever.

CNET is serving up perhaps the stupidest PC software review ever written, a comparison of IE7 and Firefox 2.

It encompasses just about every eye-rolling, groan-inducing, focus-on-the-trivial, big-picture-missing flaw I’ve ever seen in the PC review format. The comments from the three “judges” reflect a depth of analysis that is measured in submicron thicknesses. And I give the whole piece extra lameness points for the cringe-worthy prizefight metaphor, which was tired when I first read it in a comparison of IE5 and Netscape back in 19-frickin-99.

Follow the link if you must, but only if you first swear a solemn oath not to blame me when you get to the end and say, “My God, that was a colossal waste of time.”

(Full disclosure: I write for ZDNet, which is a subsidiary of CNET. But thankfully, I had nothing to do with this mess.)

… On the plus side, at least it’s short.

Yahoo jumps the gun with IE7 download

Adrian passes along this link to Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP optimized for Yahoo!

Optimized might be too strong a word. This version is tweaked a bit with the Internet Explorer Administration Kit to have a pair of custom home pages and different default settings for search engines (Guess ya-who is the default?) But I suspect if you go in and change those settings you’ll end up with a de-Yahooed version that will be indistinguishable from the official Microsoft release. So if you absolutely can’t wait, go get it.

And I hear that the real deal is coming out later today. I’ll have more thoughts tonight.

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Tip of the day: Add Google (and more) to the IE7 search box

Using IE7? Go here:

Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7

Click the Google link.

Click Add Provider. (Click the optional checkbox to set this as your default search page if that’s your pleasure.)

There, you’re done.

I’ve also added Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, and CNET to my list.

Took about 15 seconds, total.

I could add a custom search link to this site, I suppose.

IE7 automatically? It’s no rumor

David DeJean speculates that Microsoft is going to use Automatic Updates to increase IE’s market share. Maybe, maybe not. A couple of scattershot comments:

If you use Windows, this really is an important update.

IE7 tomorrow? I doubt it…

I’m reading some speculation that Microsoft plans to release IE7 tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday, October 10) as a Critical Update along with some 11 security patches, all delivered via Automatic Updates.

For the record, I don’t think it will happen.

Microsoft has made it pretty clear in recent months that they throttle traffic on their update servers to make sure that the most important updates are delivered as quickly as possible. They’ve also suggested that the volume of traffic from those servers is sufficient to break the Internet. Given that tomorrow’s Patch Tuesday package is one of the larger ones in recent memory, why would they add a huge IE7 download to the package, potentially delaying the genuinely critical patches?

It’s possible that IE7 will be available for download this week, but If I had to guess, I would bet that the actual delivery date will be at least a week from tomorrow so that Microsoft can be certain that the majority of people signed up for Automatic Updates have received their monthly booster shots. Microsoft’s Scott Graff has already confirmed that the final IE release “will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download.”

Patch Tuesday next month is later than usual, on the 14th of the month. I think it’s a safe bet that the auto-download IE release will appear in the last week of October or the first week of November.

A missing IE7 feature

Browsers crash occasionally. That’s a fact of computing life. If you have a whole bunch of tabs open, it’s a pain to try to recover the group you were working with.

You can install Firefox extensions that can handle auto-reopening tabs after a crash, and this feature (called Session Restore) is going to be included as a standard option in Firefox 2.

IE7, alas, has no such feature. If you choose to close IE7, you can click a checkbox to reopen those tabs the next time you open IE. So why can’t the error-handling code that triggers this dialog box do the same thing?

If anyone from the IE7 team is reading this post, please put this request on the stack!

Tip of the day: Zoom this web page

Several people have commented that this site is harder to read now, because of the change in typeface and the white background. One solution is to zoom the page and make everything a little easier to read.

In Internet Explorer or Firefox, select the window or browser tab containing the page you want to zoom, hold down the Ctrl key, and move the mouse wheel – forward to make the page larger, back to make it smaller, If you don’t have a mouse wheel, you can click the Change Zoom Level button in the lower right corner of the IE7 window and select a percentage. Or, in either IE or Firefox, press Ctrl+[plus sign] or Ctrl+[hyphen] to zoom in or out.

To return the zoom level to normal  size, press Ctrl+0 (that’s a zero). Update: As Alex Danvy points out in the comments, you can’t use the 0 on the numeric keypad for this; you have to use the zero on the row of numbers above the QWERTY row. Or you can use Ctrl+[asterisk], but only if you use the asterisk on the numeric keypad, not the one above the number 8 on the number row of the keyboard. Thanks. Alex!

Zooming affects only the current page, isn’t persistent, and can be undone any time. Some pages look very strange when zoomed, but those built using a decent style sheet should look just fine zoomed a few clicks in either direction.

This site’s browser stats, updated

With the help of SiteMeter, I’ve been keeping track of which browsers are used by visitors to this site. The latest stats continue to confirm that most people have made up their minds about which browser they want to use:

The last time I published these stats was on April 30, 2006. The share of visitors using Firefox or Mozilla has dipped roughly 1% since then, from 35.2% down to 34.18%. It’s still a bit higher than the August 2005 share of 33.2%, however.

Meanwhile, IE’s share crept back up by 1.5%, from almost exactly 60% to 61.47%. Not surprisingly, the percentage of people visiting this site using IE7 has more than doubled, from 6.53% last April to 14.52% today.

Five months ago, I drew this tentative conclusion and made a prediction:

The easy gains for Firefox are over. I’ll be very surprised if Firefox is able to make any significant gains in share when I look at this snapshot six months from now. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that IE will gain back some ground during that time with the help of IE7.

I jumped the gun by a month, but the prediction appears accurate. And although Firefox 2 looks like a perfectly solid upgrade, it doesn’t offer anything that’s likely to convince IE holdouts to switch now.

Trend-watchers can look at all previous editions by following these links:

April 2006

August 2005

October 2004

Update: Here’s a chart I put together showing the general trends among the major browsers. I combined all versions of each product into a single number to make the trend easier to see. (Click to see a larger version.)