Internet Explorer 7, Vista, and the cost of greater security
I repeat Laurie’s Law of Constrained Convenience: the time it takes to do anything on a computer is inversely related to the security measures being applied. I raised the issue of how much inconvenience Vista’s new security measures were going to cause back in November. Vista is not yet in wide use so it remains to be seen how things work out in practice. However, a foretaste of the possible problems is present in the many complaints that are being made about Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP. IE7 is now installed on a large number of computers. (Microsoft reports 100 million installations.) An article at eWeek describes some problems that users are having with IE7 on XP machines. I suspect that the new security present in IE7 is the source of a lot of the reported glitches. I have personally noticed a number of things that do not work the way that they used to because of the way that IE7 handles scripts and ActiveX. For example, editing this blog was affected. I also cannot download the blog database backup the way it used to work.
The author of the eWeek article is using IE7 on Vista and he says:
I can’t speak to the problems of commenters, because I am not running IE 7 on a Windows XP machine. I use IE 7 on Vista. My problems are very different. My Vista machine’s BIOS supports DEP (Data Execution Prevention), which is enabled in the operating system. In either the default or advanced DEP settings, IE 7 crashes when running numerous plug-ins and some ActiveX controls. For example, if I try to open a PDF using IE 7, the browser crashes and Windows Vista sends up a pop-up explaining the browser has been closed because of a DEP access violation.
The problem affects so many plug-ins or Active controls, Firefox gets more use than IE 7 on my Vista machine.
So be prepared to accept the fact that greater security has a price in functionality and convenience.
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