Occasionally I check the news at ZDNet and found this hilarious statement.

Ben English, Microsoft’s security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes “rigorous code reviews” and is no less secure than any other browser.

“Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don’t think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there,” English said.

That has to be the funniest thing I have read. And Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director, said this.

“I don’t agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important,” he said. “It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.

“If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that.”

People don’t want popup blocking or the spiffy new adblock that one can add to Firefox. What else don’t we want? Themes, security, advanced cookie management like setting Firefox to not allow sites to set cookies after I have deleted them. I love that feature. As to Microsoft responding quickly, that’s a joke. People have to point out the security flaws then wait for a patch. And unless one upgrades to the latest version of Windows, won’t get any upgrades to IE.

English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users.

Did Microsoft ask anybody? Let’s see, I currently have 11 tabs open in Firefox, 13 in Safari, 8 in Camino. Imagine if they were all separate windows. I love tabbed browsing. I admit to using IE at work and that is for the sole reason we are not allowed to download any software on the computers, can’t have Firefox. I can’t see why anyone would prefer a browser with so many deficiencies as IE has when there are better alternatives.