There’s been another nasty exploit/trojan for Internet Explorer on Windows making the rounds. This one waits for you to log on to certain Internet banking sites, captures your login information, and then send sends it off to someone nefarious so they can do nefarious things with it.
Of course, all us Mac users have a sorry little chuckle for our windows friends, and all us Mozilla/Firfox users get to have a second chuckle. Then the true believers come out of the woodwork and proclaim that surly this will lead people away from IE and towards a Mozilla based browser and, perhaps, even away from Windows entirely.
This last group of people gets a derisive snort from yours truly.
IE never become the default browser because it was better (which, if you ignore security holes, by version 5 it was). It became the dominant browser because Microsoft was able to set it as a computer’s default browser and start tying it into the operating system, which made it really hard to get rid of. Microsoft Marketing worked hard to make sure people didn’t know what a browser was, but made sure they knew if they clicked on the little blue “e” that “The Intorweb” would magically appear.
It’s this same ubiquitousness that keeps most people using it to this day, both the both non-tech savvy users and people who should know better. Unless the Mozilla foundation starts pushing the browser on companies like Dell and AOL, it’s going to remain an IE world for a long time, and that means a security wasteland.