The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Does anywone else who is forced to use IE (as I am from my employer owned PC) notice that the unwanted blue background surrounding your avatars has gone away? Is this a result of an actual improvement implemented by microsoft or of more brilliant work by MordEth?

Bruce,

If you think Microsoft fixed something, I want copies of whatever mind-alerting Edison Re-Creations you’re playing.

Actually, I finally got around to getting the JavaScript that I had to fix inline PNG graphics for IE6 (while IE7 is still broken in a lot of ways—mostly in that it makes it easy for people to hijack your computer—it does at least display PNG transparency properly). You just beat me to posting about it...I was playing with more of Richard’s labels in Photoshop...

The current fix works as long as I don’t use PNGs called from CSS—the JavaScript trick only works on the HTML <img> tag, and I really should have fixed it a long time ago. It’s one of the things that can be done here but not on ProBoards (and there are quite a lot of those).

However, with all the holes in IE6, you’d think more employers would care about the security of their computers.

Plus, with Windows, since Internet Explorer is built into the operating system, exploiting IE means you’re in like Flynn. It’s like making the walls out of tissue paper, and then painting them to look like brick.

The worst part is that a lot of really nasty stuff can be spread by innocuous sites (most recently¹, Google’s DoubleClick, one of the biggest advertising sources), because most sites with advertising (and I’m sure everyone here goes to sites with advertising, somewhere) use third parties for their advertising. So if their ad provider is (unwittingly) serving malicious ads, if you’re using IE, you’re basically asking to have your computer exploited, and the severity of the possible exploit really depends on what gaping holes Microsoft’s not yet managed to patch this month.

So if you’re running Windows, get a different browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all free), remember that the 2nd Tuesday of every month is ‘Patch Tuesday’ (so you want to be sure to do your updates), and get reputable anti-virus software.

Let me know if you have any questions, I’m here to help.

— MordEth

[hr][/hr]
¹ When I say recently, I mean this story ran yesterday. But there’s been a long history of malicious advertising, and it is essentially exclusive to IE exploits. So be informed.

I should have figured it was you and not Microsoft. Actually I have not personally used Internet exploder in years, I'm a Firefox fan. My wife still insists in using it. I wish I could delete it totally from teh PC.

Still when travelling or sometimes when I am at work, I check sites like this forum with unsing an employer provided pc which runs only Exploder and they dont even give me access rights to download anything else. I guess it encourages one to do anything important from your own PC at home!

You could always get a USB thumb drive (≈ $6 for 2GB, which is more than enough) and put a portable version of Firefox on it (which would store all of your bookmarks and preferences on the thumb drive, for use with any Windows PC.

Valecnik wrote:I'm a Firefox fan.

I’m with you on that one—I’ve been using Mozilla browsers since Netscape spun them off. Actually, while I was in San Francisco in January, thanks to the Mozilla shirt I wore the first day, I had a couple of people think that I was with the Mozilla Foundation.

Although the latest beta of Safari is pretty nice—I’ve been playing with it off and on since it was released yesterday. It has some nice features, but Firefox 3’s location bar and the add-ons for it, I don’t see me switching...yet.

...and I do like Safari on my iPhone.

— MordEth

As an occasional IE user ( ) I have to report that I NEVER saw blue around any of the avatars, so I wonder if it was not a local PC issue at work here?

Steve, if you NEVER saw the blue around your avatars, it means the gremlins have already breached your security and are probably draining your bank account as we speak. Get Firefox or one of the alternatives. You will never go back.

Yeh, I used to get the blue box when looking at the site at work where have haaaave to use IE. But firefox at home - its all been hunky dorey from the word go.

I guess not many people use IE unless they have to and thats cetainly not a good recommendation for a piece of software!

RJ

Nice! Thanks David!

Steve wrote:As an occasional IE user ( ) I have to report that I NEVER saw blue around any of the avatars, so I wonder if it was not a local PC issue at work here?

Steve,

You were using IE7 and not IE6. The problem with PNG transparency is specific to IE6 and before. IE7 has different problems—mostly involving how easy it makes doing malicious things to your computer with a website you visit.

At the moment the breakdown of our visitors and their browsers looks like this:

Browser	Visits	% Visits
Internet Explorer	4,524	49.23%
Firefox	3,495	38.03%
Safari	868	9.45%
Opera	218	2.37%
Netscape	75	0.82%
Chrome	10	0.11%

And considering that IE ships as the default browser with all Windows machines (i.e. ≈ 83% of our visitors), it’s a good sign that the IE percentage is as low as it is—the online phonograph community is at least somewhat informed with regards to browsers.

Here’s where using transparent PNG images becomes a problem (and why most web developers hate Internet Explorer):

IE Version	Visits	% Visits
7.0	3,251	71.86%
6.0	1,250	27.63%
8.0	23	0.51%

So fully 13.6% of our total visits come from Internet Explorer 6—which means either I can say, ‘oh well, that’s not going to work in IE6’, ‘we can’t do this feature because IE6 is too broken to allow me to do it’ or ‘we can have ____, but I’m going to have to hack some work-around for IE6.’ IE7 has the same problems, to a lesser extent, but most of its issues are its abysmal handling of CSS, and most web developers just serve IE7 different CSS than they do to browsers that aren’t broken.

It’s generally easier than trying to educate the people looking at pages, although it can take hours (if not longer) to correct for all of IE’s failings—if it’s even possible, depending on what you want to do. Only Microsoft thinks they’re completely above implementing published standards (like HTML and CSS), although supposedly IE8—the beta version of which accounts for 0.51% of our IE traffic—is going to fix this. I’ll believe it when it gets released and I see it with my own eyes.

And the truly sad thing is that very few of the people running Windows cannot at least upgrade to IE7 (as you need Windows XP or newer to run it):

Windows Version	Visits	% Visits
XP	4,754	62.53%
Vista	2,624	34.51%
2000	180	2.37%
NT	23	0.30%
Server 2003	19	0.25%
ME	2	0.03%
98	1	0.01%

The versions above in red are not able to be upgraded to IE7.

And here’s a final bonus table—the breakdown of our visits based on what operating system the visitor used:

Operating System	Visits	% Visits
Windows	7,603	82.73%
Macintosh	1,308	14.23%
iPhone	273	2.97%
Linux	4	0.04%
SunOS	2	0.02%

While Windows may never be ‘secure’, the first step to making it ‘reasonably secure’ is to stop using Internet Explorer.

Note, these statistics are as of midnight, 25 February, 2009 and will no doubt change.

— MordEth

Valecnik wrote:I'm a Firefox fan. My wife still insists in using it. I wish I could delete it totally from teh PC.

What you can do is to install an IE theme for Firefox such as Neofox IE 6 (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4327) and then change the IE icon's redirection to Firefox. That way, one will click on the big e Icon and will see a browser that looks like IE but instead is FF.