Unsafe at any site?

Do you remember muscle cars? I know I had a serious case of the hots for
a '71 Hemi 'Cuda when I was, oh, 12 years old or so. Detroit kept
pushing large-displacement cars as far as they could go, and teen-aged
boys loved them. Of course, the day came when the insurance companies
(and the reality of gas prices) made them too expensive to own, and the
genre died overnight. Now, of course, we have cars that with better
performance in nearly every aspect, plus enhanced safety and better
fuel economy. Let's call it product maturity.

It's just possible that Microsoft's Internet Explorer will someday be seen
as the Hemi 'Cuda of web browsers. The folks in Redmond have done an
admirable job of building performance features into the world's favorite
browser, but we keep being reminded that it can be expensive to operate.
The latest reminder came in the guise of a CERT Security Alert that warned
of ways in which hackers could cause malicious code to execute on a
system in spite of existing security software. Wonderful.

Now, Microsoft has responded (after only three weeks), but

it's a sure bet that thousands upon thousands of systems will remain
unprotected for months to come. The question is whether it's time for
IT managers to bite the bullet and switch to another browser.

I'm one of the strange folks who runs around with several browsers on
my system. I've long been a fan of Mozilla (Firebird is my current favorite)
and Opera has a lot to recommend it. Unfortunately, a lot of otherwise
reasonably developers have decided to tie critical web application functions
to IE features, so it's going to require a firm stand on the part of
large organizations before things change in any meaningful way.

So what do you think? This blog is going to be a back-and-forth kinda

thing, and I'm eager to hear you tell me why I'm entirely wrong.
It's a holiday weekend, so blogging will be light until next week. Enjoy
the fourth, and let me know what you want to see from me.