According to an email apparently sent to users at the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services) on Friday, an IE bug could allow evil web sites to damage your computer just by going to the site. It goes on to say that there is currently no fix and that to reduce the risk users should avoid “unfamiliar” web sites or just use “Mozilla browser.” I assume they mean Firefox but, again, who knows?
Not an outright rejection of IE, but certainly permission to run something else. This is new because over the last few years I’ve personally encountered several internal sites that function only when the user is running IE. They “fix” them when they are pointed out, but it’s clear a lot of the development work at NCI is ignoring other browsers in their testing.
(I choose to believe it’s bad testing rather than a concerted effort to push users towards IE.)
NCI warns users about using IE
Following up from his earlier (oddly very popular) post about NASA’s rumored preference for FireFox, Dan’s posted another story about the National Cancer Institute’s internal warnings about the dangers of using Internet Explorer.
Unfortunately grants.gov doesn’t work with FireFox. I mistakenly had FireFox set as the default browser on Virtual PC when I tried to submit a proposal. If you find this sort of thing amusing you can read about it:
http://digitalbio.blogspot.com/2005/12/my-humble-efforts-to-submit.html