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Unsolicited notes, links and advice from an online development firm in Kansas City.

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Microsoft is urging Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade in an online marketing campaign aimed at holiday shoppers.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases–those who don’t have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren’t tech-savvy enough to realize there’s a reason to move on.

It’s this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign’s first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

  • 09:25 AM 12.01.09 by Wade Meredith
  • Filed Under: Links

Serious Security Flaw Found in Internet Explorer

In other news, water is still wet…

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say…

…”Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer,” said [Secunia] in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the “underlying vulnerability” was present in all versions of the browser.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.

Serious security flaw found in IE – BBC

IE8 Is the Harbinger of Web Standards

Jeffry Zeldman on WebDesignInterviews.com:

…what’s really going to drive standards awareness in the next months is the release of IE8. For the first time, IE will no longer support “IE-only” websites by default. Instead, it will support standards by default. Think about that. If you’re a developer, and you’ve somehow managed to remain completely unaware of standards-based design, your IE-only website won’t work in IE. Wow! Right? So what will you do?

If you plan to have a career, you’ll start learning about standards-based design fast. (IE8 will support old-fashioned IE-only sites if you insert a tag in the head of each web page instructing the browser to do so, but that’s merely to protect old sites; it’s not a strategy you can pursue if you intend to create new sites.)

That’s the big news where browsers and standards adoption are concerned.

He’s right. IE’s position as the dominant browser on the web combined with it’s everlasting lack of support for web standards has created a unique bottleneck that’s been hard, but not impossible, to ignore. The pressure for web standards that actually mean something has been building for years. That bottleneck is about to be opened wide and the aftermath will be painful on a grand scale.