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SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft is touting freshly launched
Internet Explorer 8 as its champion in the competitive Web browser
arena, urging holdouts to upgrade from earlier versions of the
software.
IE8 has been catching on since
its release five months ago, but Microsoft is hoping to leave behind
aging IE6 as well as much-maligned Vista after Windows 7 operating
system launches in October.
Despite being released nine years
ago, IE6 still claims 27.2 percent of the browser market, according
to figures released in July by Net Applications.
“The reason to still be on IE6
at this point is lack of awareness, or the ‘good-enough’ problem
that people are satisfied with what they are using,” said Amy
Barzdukas, general manager of IE and consumer security at Microsoft.
“Particularly in this economy,
it is difficult to be cavalier and just say update to IE8.”
Schools, hospitals and other
cash-strapped operations could be daunted by the cost of upgrading
computer systems to new software.
IE6 also tends to be used with
pirated versions of Windows XP operating system because newer
software is better designed to expose illegitimate copies, according
to Barzdukas.
Microsoft reports seeing more XP
use in emerging economies such as Brazil and India where piracy
rates are higher than in the United States.
A drawback to people sticking
with IE 6 is that Microsoft’s image can be maligned by software
deficiencies that have been fixed in newer versions,” according to
Barzdukas.
“People can get frustrated with
that experience and say Microsoft stinks, or IE stinks, and base
that perception on technology released ten years ago,” Barzdukas
told Agence France-Presse during a visit this week to San Francisco.
“We want them to experience the
latest.”
Microsoft on Thursday released
NSS Labs research indicating that IE8 excels at blocking phishing
and malware attacks.
In Microsoft-sponsored testing at
a Texas lab, NSS found that IE 8 and an open-source Firefox browser
from Mozilla tied for first place when it came to catching
“social-engineering” phishing attacks.
“Internet Explorer 8 and
Firefox 3 were the most consistent in the high level of protection
they offered,” the NSS study said.
--AFP
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