Introduction to Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, referred to as IE or MSIE, is a web browser launched by Microsoft. Internet Explorer is the most widely used web browser, although it has lost some market share since 2004. In April 2005, its market share was approximately 85%.

Internet Explorer is an integral part of Microsoft's new version of the Windows operating system. On older operating systems, it's standalone and free. Starting with Windows 95 OSR2, it is bundled as the default browser in all new versions of the Windows operating system. However, this year's major update only applies to Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1. Currently, Internet Explorer 7 has been bundled into Vista and provided to XP SP2 through online updates. In mid-December 2008, the latest version of Internet Explorer 8, RC1, was launched, and users can download and install the independent installation package.

Because it initially gained market share by bundling with Windows, and continued to expose major security vulnerabilities, its execution efficiency was not high, and it did not support W3C standards. Internet Explorer has been criticized, but it has to be admitted that it is contributed to the development of the Internet.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that it would not continue to develop a version of Internet Explorer for Apple computers. Support for the Mac OS version of Internet Explorer also ended in 2005, and downloads stopped in 2006.

Maintainer: Microsoft

Latest release: 8.0 Preview First Edition / December 16, 2008

Latest test: IE8 RC1

Software category: Web browser

License agreement: Proprietary

Process name: iexplore.exe

Features

Internet Explorer provides the broadest web browsing and features built into the operating system, such as Microsoft Update. In the most famous browser wars, Microsoft provides the most It replaces Netscape with innovative new features.

Usability and browsing affinity

The recent version also adds pop-up window blocking and mainstream functions such as paginated browsing and RSS. Older versions can achieve paginated browsing by installing the MSN Search Toolbar.

Component Object Model

Component Object Model (COM) technology is widely used in Internet Explorer. It allows third-party vendors to add functionality through browser helper objects (BHO); and allows websites to provide rich content through ActiveX. Since these objects can have the same permissions as the browser itself (under certain circumstances), there are significant security concerns. The latest version of Internet Explorer provides an add-on manager to control ActiveX controls and browser help objects, as well as an "add-on-free" version (under All Programs/Accessories/System Tools).

Security Architecture

Internet Explorer uses a zone-based security architecture, which means that websites are organized together according to specific conditions. It allows restrictions on a large number of functions or only on specified functions.

Patches and updates to the browser are released regularly through the Windows Update service and through automatic updates. While security patches continue to be released for a range of platforms, the latest feature enhancements and security improvements are only released for Windows XP.

The latest version of Internet Explorer provides a download monitor and installation monitor, allowing users to choose whether to download and install executable programs in two steps. This prevents malware from being installed. Executable files downloaded with Internet Explorer are marked as potentially unsafe by the operating system, and the user is asked to confirm whether they want to execute the program each time until the user confirms that the file is "safe."

Group Policies

Internet Explorer is fully configurable through Group Policy. Windows server domain administrators can apply and enforce a range of settings that alter the user interface (such as disabling certain menu items and individual configuration options), as well as restrict security features (such as downloading files), zero configuration, per-site settings, and ActiveX controls behavior, etc.

Policy settings can be set on a per-user and per-machine basis.

Web page standards support

Internet Explorer uses the Trident typesetting engine, which almost fully supports HTML 4.01, CSS Level 1, XML 1.0 and DOM Level 1, but has some typography errors. It also partially supports CSS Level 2 and DOM Level 2. Its built-in XML interpreter supports XHTML, but Microsoft removed this support from IE 5.0 onwards, making it difficult to access. Like other browsers, when the MIME type identifier is "text/html", it can be interpreted as XHTML. It can also interpret XHTML as XML when the MIME type identifier is "application/xml" and "text/xml", but a small XSLT metric [9] is required to re-enable XML support for XHTML. When defining it as a preferred type such as "application/xhtml+xml", it pretends not to understand XHTML and instead treats it as an unknown file type for downloading.

Internet Explorer relies on DOCTYPE to determine whether a web page should be rendered according to an older version or according to W3C standards. (Internet Explorer always uses W3C standards for printing.) Depending on the version of MSXML, it can fully support XSLT 1.0 or the December 1998 XSL draft. Internet Explorer has its own variant of ECMAScript called JScript.

Patented extensions

Internet Explorer introduces a series of patented extensions to web standards, including HTML, CSS and DOM. This causes some websites to be displayed normally only by Internet Explorer.

Criticism

Internet Explorer is a web browser that has attracted a lot of criticism, most of which focuses on its security architecture and support for open standards.

Security

Internet Explorer has been criticized primarily for its security. Many spyware, adware and computer viruses are rampant on the Internet because of Internet Explorer's security vulnerabilities and cracks in the security structure. Sometimes browsing some malicious websites will be automatically installed maliciously. This is called "forced installation": filling in false descriptions in the ActiveX security description to hide the actual purpose of the software and misleading users to install some malicious software.

Of course, Internet Explorer is not just a problem for one user, but for most users. They affect many computers showing security issues everywhere. Microsoft has no responsibility to patch security vulnerabilities and release patch files [10] Except for Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities, Microsoft has taken a long time to patch vulnerabilities. In some cases, malicious website creators exploited vulnerabilities to attack users before Microsoft released a fix.

Support for Web Standards

Other criticisms came mostly from technical expert users, website developers, and developers of software applications built on Internet Explorer who were concerned about the Internet Explorer supports open standards because Internet Explorer often uses proprietary web standards extensions to achieve similar functionality.

Internet Explorer has some degree of support for some standardized technologies, but there are also many implementation gaps and compatibility glitches—some minor, some not—that have led to increasing criticism from technology developers. Increase. The increase in criticism is largely due to the fact that Internet Explorer's competitors have provided relatively complete technical support and that standards-compliant applications are becoming more widely used.

Because Internet Explorer is widely used around the world, web developers seeking cross-platform and powerful code often find Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, proprietary feature sets, and incomplete standards support. became their biggest stumbling block.

Generally speaking, web developers should write code that is cross-platform, so it runs on all major browsers. Internet Explorer's technology is very Closed, and only supports a few CSS, HTML and DOM features (and many implementations have problems). Competitors Firefox and Opera are not only ahead of Internet Explorer in this regard, but they also have native XHTML support.

Because of this, Internet Explorer has always failed the Acid2 test that verifies support for CSS standards. Another huge shortcoming of Internet Explorer stems from the PNG format, an issue that was only addressed in Internet Explorer 7. Nonetheless, Internet Explorer 7's performance will be significantly reduced when accessing web pages containing transparent PNGs.