Android is a whole other ballgame with phone companies dropping the ball again and again. They’re like power companies caught flat-footed by security holes and not able to understand why they can’t just push out product and never issue updates for it. The world is changing and their business models have to change, but of course they fight it tooth and nail.

While Microsoft did release this update in a timely manner and gave everyone a workaround ahead of time, I wish they had offered the workaround earlier and hadn’t done the usual spin doctoring to claim it’s not a big deal. But that’s Microsoft – they’re more and more a marketing company now than a technology company, most of what they produce is a little bit of tech underneath a load of frothy spin.

Android suffers from a similar problem where updates are available but wait around on users or vendors to get around to the update, and as a result the vast majority are running insecure and outdated versions.

I strongly believe if you leave the responsibility for security up to the end user you can’t complain when they mess it up. Murphy’s law or some such.

There are features, such as the cached bookmarks, that I really like. There are some bugs, such as when Chrome loses network connection and occasionally cannot recover. The residual chrome.exe process won’t die, even when I try to kill it with ProcExplorer.

I like the auto-update feature (which I can block with Vipre IS 2012 firewall HIPS). I like the way they integrate Flash into the auto-update.

All in all, I like Chrome.

Eventually it will probably be baked in but the whole series of articles about this issue has smacked of a poorly handled response to a major scandal – how many corporate or non news reading users is microsoft really expecting will do this? I’d be surprised if even 10% of their total client base ends up doing any of these measures.

Are you absolutely sure you have builds with IE 7? Because you can run IE 8 in a mode where it’s virtually identical to IE 7 (switch Browser Mode to IE7 and Document Mode to IE7). But it’s still IE8 and security advisories for IE8 should apply.

In short, the reason W7 & W2K8 isn’t included under IE7 is because, if you went out of your way to install IE7 on W7 and managed to hack it in, you get to deal with supporting it.

I think IE9 is cleaner, and has a more organic feel than Chrome, plus I love the pictures. I love the security features for IE9, because I have other users that will click on anything, including a brother with severe mental limitations. (I removed Java a while ago, and I haven’t needed it for anything.)

I’ll keep Chrome as a backup, but I’m not impressed.

And Phoenix, thanks for the update reminder for Flash Player! May I add that there is also an update for Adobe Shockwave Player, the newest version being 11.6.7.r637 at http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/

I had no problems with the patch installation on 5 of my 6 machines, but it wouldn’t install on a Vista Ultimate SP2 32-bit machine just as an earlier FixIt patch wouldn’t — could never get that resolved, so like before I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow for the out-of-band update to resolve the IE flaw for that computer.