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Wow - Germany & France say MSIE is a security risk!

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kostya:
I will take the unpopular opinion and point out a couple things in defense of Microsoft:

One, backwards compatibility is a major selling point. See the Vista launch issues when Microsoft decided to drop a bit of compatibility so random hardware abandoned by the original manufacturer stopped working. People had hissy fits over it. Microsoft learned better and mostly anything that was written for a Microsoft operating system newer than DOS will work. People like that. No company wants to spend millions of dollars to license 1000 copies of a piece of software and then have to do it all over again 5 years later because a new OS came out that does not support the software.

Second, Linux has a lot more backwards and obscure hardware compatibility than Windows (look at all the configuration options of a distro like Gentoo). Linux makes a point of providing the same user interface as the first version of Unix (by which I mean that all the same commands and common programs are there or emulated).

Third of all, many of the IE security vulnerabilities arise from the fact that a shockingly large amount of people still use IE6. Why? Because it came installed with Windows XP. Firefox users will always have a version not much older then when they downloaded it. IE users are too often the type of people who would not run Windows Update (yes, you have to run it for it to upgrade to a version that will automatically install important updates).

Fourth, you cannot blame Microsoft for the horror that is JavaScript. It was invented by Netscape. Those same people who invented it are the ones who founded and are running the Mozilla project.

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