StupidScript - 11:46 pm on Jan 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

Agreeing with incrediBILL ... most IE users with exploited machines simply don't know how to recognize that fact. They think "this darn machine is going so slow" and "geez, every time I try to go to x website it goes to y website, stupid DSL provider".

The people who are most harmed are not those who have been exploited, unless they fall victim to identity theft (not at all uncommon) or their system becomes totally unuseable (and that is at cross-purposes to most exploiters' goals, so while the machine may slow down, it rarely becomes unuseable). The people who are most harmed are the rest of society as spam and worm propagation becomes more serious every day, thanks to those security holes and the blithe ignorance of the users whose systems have been compromised.

On a side note, IE doesn't render things well ... it renders them in its own, outside-the-standards way. If you visit sites that are not friendly to FF, it's because the developers chose to limit themselves to MSIE's way of doing things, which is not by any means the standardized way of doing things.

And it points out the general laziness of a large number of developers who can't be bothered to write their code as standards-based and then drop in a few hacks to get MSIE to render them properly, instead of the other way around.