IE Blog -- Off the Reading List

I have a page of Internet Explorer Plugins on Unixdaemon.net, while none of them are complex they do seem to be both useful and quite popular (over 30,000 downloads in the last five months… not too bad :)) and so I have a fair amount of interest in IE despite being a very happy FireFox user.

Now Microsoft have decided to make themselves more open and transparent, and part of this includes something called the IE Blog, a site I subscribed to about a day after it started. In my view IE is an area of MS that I’d expect to have a fair bit of activity, it’s used by a high percentage of the ‘net, FireFox and Mozilla are beating at its door and, lets be honest, it’s an excellent example of how to not do secure coding. From phishing attacks, broken code separation and huge numbers of vulnerable automation interfaces this is hardly a stable, mature and boring project; although that’s the impression you get from reading the IE blog.

For a description of what they were willing to talk about have a look at the What we talk about on IEBlog posting (coincidently written by a guy named Dean) and then have a browse through the archives. See if you can find any more than one thing per month that’s actually worth reading and not just faff. While most of the MS blogs are excellent and help promote the company this one is a good example of how not to run a corporate blog; it feels too clean, sanitised and well, dead. One less feed for me to read.