Summary: Putting ballot screens in perspective and new information about the zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer

THE purpose of Web browser ballot screens (only in Europe) is often misunderstood due to Microsoft spin doctoring.

Several Microsoft bloggers congratulate Microsoft for making changes to a ballot screen which was created almost a decade late, well after Microsoft had broken the law to obtain market share it did not deserve. This is a subject that we wrote about comprehensively in:

1. Mozilla Unofficially Joins ECIS and Opera in Opposition to Microsoft's Deal in Europe; Microsoft Poisoned Firefox
2. Parties Behind Complaints Against Microsoft in EU Not Pleased
3. Microsoft's Older Crimes Against Web Browsers Return, Microsoft's New Attacks on JavaScript Revisited
4. Opera Complains About Vista 7
5. Microsoft Bypasses the Law and Breaks the Web for Opera and GNU/Linux Users, Again
6. Mozilla and Opera Still Object to Microsoft's Deal with the Commission
7. Microsoft Hopes a Tickbox Will Restore Fair Competition in Europe; Opera Disagrees
8. Microsoft Crowd Incites People Against Rival Web Browsers

The rest is history, but the point most important to remember is that the European Commission punishes Microsoft because it deserves to be punished. Those ballot screens are well overdue and they will probably not have the desired effect anyway because Microsoft has been busy defacing the Web with more hostility towards web standards (XAML being the latest obvious example). This is nothing new. Microsoft deliberately put things in Internet Explorer which were inherently insecure (e.g. ActiveX), just so that the World Wide Web would be made incompatible with the competition.

The poor design and the negligence (nonchalance) from Microsoft recently led to a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer [1, 2], which is only now being addressed along with other "critical" flaws.

Tuesday is due to bring six bulletins, three of which are critical. The critical fixes address flaws in Windows and Office as well as IE. The Office update covers flaws in Project, Word and Works 8.5.

Is there any major Microsoft product that does not suffer from "critical" flaws on a monthly basis? ⬆

"Our products just aren't engineered for security."

--Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive