I’m sure you’ve heard the news that Google was attacked and has since threatened to leave China. And soon after that announcement we’ve heard that the attack partially originated from computers running Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

So what’s the logical conclusion?

Well, the German and the French governments both recommended their citizens to abandon IE for an alternative browser. There certainly is enough competition in the web browser market for people to choose from. Is jumping ship really the logical move? Probably not; every web browser has their share of security vulnerabilities and this weeks news will soon fade. Microsoft will also release a patch to close this attack vector.

At Thirdi we don’t mind too much which browser you use, but we do prefer you use the latest release so that we can build better performing and more capable web applications. Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari all grew in 2009 taking away market share from the established Internet Explorer. Will this vulnerability only continue that trend?

I think the best thing that will come out of this mess is that more people will be aware of alternative browsers and give at least one of them a try. Who knows, maybe they’ll even enjoy it.