| >useful, but security patches? No one should be using IE8
| >anyway, so patches there are irrelevant. What else is there?
| []
| According to someone here in the IEradicator debates (which I thought
| was you), everyone's using parts of IE anyway, whether they like it or
| not, even if they use another browser for actual browsing - so doesn't
| that make patches for it totally relevant?
No, not really. The system uses IE browser windows
for various things: CHM help files, HTAs, 3rd-party
software.... So you can't take out the actual browser.
But that's not the same as using it online. There have
been 3 recent patches for IE that I'm aware of:
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms14-021
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms14-024
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms14-029
They're all for attacks that employ a webpage hack.
A lot of bugs involve "privilege elevation", which generally
doesn't apply to XP. Most other bugs involve online attacks.
If you don't use MS software online, those don't apply.
What's left? Mainly file corruption attacks. In other words,
you have to be attacked from somewhere. IE can't get attacked
just by sitting there. For instance, there could be a case
where you download a corrupt CHM. (There have been CHM
bugs in the past.) There could also be .DOC bugs, if you have
MS Office installed. There was even a bug in .EMF graphic files
a few years ago. Just about any file type that allows for script
or other executable functionality can have bugs. (CHM, PDF, SWF,
any PE file, HTML.) It's possible that there could be
something like a new CHM attack, but in general the patches
coming through are not going to matter for people who don't
use IE online. (One should avoid downloading CHM, PDF, or
DOC files from mysterious Chinese websites, in any case.
Whether you're fully patched or not, that's a risk.)
IE has been an unusable mess, security-wise, for years,
but that's as a browser used online. In Windows it's ubiquitous
and not particularly risky. I love IE. I use it for HTAs, for testing
webpages, and I have it set as my default browser so that I
can open HTML files locally without waiting for Firefox to load.
I just don't allow IE to go online. *Ever*.
I currently have IE6 installed. I see no reason to update it
or patch it. Microsoft breaks rendering compatibility in IE with
every version, so I design all of my webpages to work in what
they call "quirks mode". By leaving off the DOCTYPE tag in HTML
I can indicate to IE that it should use quirks mode rendering.
Every version of IE will then render a webpage as it renders in IE6.
That way I can just design one page for IE and one page for all
other browsers. And I can test it all on my machine with IE6 and
Firefox. So there's really no reason for me to risk the integrity of
the system by even installing IE8.