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Comment by Piskvorrr | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, yet it doesn't quite line up with the facts, IMNSHO: IE on XP only goes up to 8, yet this CVE goes up to 11, and it's what, two weeks old? http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/emerging-threat-micros... - and guess what, the recommendation is "Do not use IE, at all, not even the new versions." Both the browser and its brand are broken beyond any repair.

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Sure it does. The moment I saw headlines like "US government recommends against using Internet Explorer" because of that bug, I thought "Chrome and Mozilla guys must be over-joyous with this". Google already promised enterprises that they'd support XP a year longer than Microsoft, for Chrome. This made it even easier to convince them to switch to Chrome. And I don't think Mozilla plans on ending XP support anytime soon either. I think they only ended Windows 98 support a few years ago.

But after the patch the advice wouldn't hold any more, everyone could go back to happily using IE.

If XP wasn't patched then the news articles would be more nuanced. The "Internet Explorer is dangerous!" theme from earlier articles might have continued and left the average consumer thinking that IE was broken everywhere.

(I'm not sure if I totally agree, but this seems to be what the article is suggesting. And I think it still makes sense even with IE on XP stuck at IE8)

"Do not use IE until a patch is released" is what it really said. The browser has been steadily improving its standards compliance with each new version. Yes, many people are using alternative browsers nowadays but I don't think that means IE is hopeless.

"Until a patch is released - sometime, eventually, hopefully: no clear date is given, and the track record says this same situation will repeat within six months."

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