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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday December 16 2015, @08:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same dept.

While both Betteridge's Law and common sense say, "No," Zack Whittaker at ZDNet takes a closer look:

An analysis of the last five-months' worth of monthly software updates shows that Edge had 25 vulnerabilities shared with versions of Internet Explorer, which had a total of 100 vulnerabilities.

Earlier this month on its scheduled Patch Tuesday update offering, Microsoft released MS15-124, a cumulative update for Internet Explorer, and MS15-125, a near-identical patch for Edge. Of the 15 flaws patched in Internet Explorer, 11 of those were also patched in Edge.

According to a Microsoft blog post earlier this year, the software giant's newest browser, an exclusive for Windows 10, is said to have been designed to "defend users from increasingly sophisticated and prevalent attacks."

In doing that, Edge scrapped older, insecure, or flawed plugins or frameworks, like ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects. That already helped to cut a number of possible drive-by attacks traditionally used by attackers. EdgeHTML, which powers Edge's rendering engine, is a fork of Trident, which still powers Internet Explorer.

[...] Older versions of Internet Explorer will be retired by mid-January, giving millions of users about a month to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11, or to Edge on Windows 10.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Kawumpa on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:28AM

    by Kawumpa (1187) on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:28AM (#277606)

    That's only because far too many, if not most, web designers and publishers focus more on the presentation of the content than on the content itself. In many cases the presentation is the content. The annoying thing is, that most users or consumers of content seem to agree. They actually do want prettier sites and perceive modern web design as useful.

    Web design has in many cases reached a point where large parts of the web have become almost unusable for me. I am mostly online to communicate and to search for and retrieve information. Many sites make this really difficult by emphasizing graphics, fonts and very weird navigation concepts. Take for example the average business card style website with a large (sometimes banner style) photo on top (have a look at some random WordPress themes). On my devices (desktops and laptops) I often only see this photo and maybe some form of navitgation (if I am lucky) but no actual content. I have to scroll to confirm that I am where I want to be, especially if this design is followed throughout the whole page. What's the point?

    And who still thinks that every page has to be an application? The site's navigation is hidden behind tons of javascript to display "super cool" overlays and mouse hover menus. Moving the mouse across the screen will reformat the page several times and flicker for no reason whatsoever. It doesn't make reaching and reading the content any easier than static menus and navigation (unless the design is the content). And one has to love additional content that is loaded while scrolling down instead of loading the complete page. Disabling the browser in page search functionality is genius, especially where the site does not have a decent search engine.

    There are cases where extensive use of graphics and javascript enhances the user experience but that is rarely the case when looking for text based information. The return of some sanity would be nice.

    P.S.: And we haven't even talked on the uselessness of advertising... :)

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:59PM (#277795)

    For the discussion, I'll discuss 3 categories of applications:

    1. Brochure-ware: public-facing sites or applications that want to present a pretty or fashionable style for marketing reasons.
    2. Business-oriented (CRUD) applications that want to look professional and up-to-date, but a bit less concerned about fashion.
    3. Internal specialized CRUD applications that don't care that much about aesthetics or fashion.

    For #1 and some of #2, decision makers are probably going to focus on fashion and aesthetics and there's not much one can do about that. Humans are superficial apes who like to follow bright shiny trendy things.

    But for #3 (and some of #2), a coordinate-based client with WYSIWYG layouts could make life a lot easier for devs such that sacrificing fashion-chasing could become acceptable once the productivity boost is seen. As much as orgs are fad-chasers, they are also cheapskates, especially smaller orgs. If a client UI standard saves them money, they will sacrifice visual trendiness.

    The current browser standards makes #3 apps a royal pain in the ass. There are frameworks to simplify UI stuff, but one has to get to know the framework first to use it timely and well. And flaky layout issues still pop up.