It's no secret that many of the security holes in Windows are a direct result of Microsoft's decision to co-mingle Internet Explorer's code base with that of the operating system. This is the very opposite of the traditional modular approach of Unix programming. The deeper you integrate a program into the operating system, the likelier that a programming bug will have far-reaching ramifications that no one foresaw. It also means that fixing one simple bug could trigger a whole new slew of bugs. Thus when a security exploit is discovered in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's programmers (who by all accounts are actually quite good at their job) are forced to spend a huge amount of time testing to make sure that their patch won't create a worse problem than it solves.

In view of the above, one would expect that Microsoft would be expending an effort to make Internet Explorer more modular, but according to this story published at OSNews, the exact opposite seems to be taking place. The author, Roberto J. Dohnert, participated in an online chat with the Internet Explorer development team, and was told that IE would be integrated even more tightly into future versions of Windows. This is, no doubt, great news for developers of anti-virus software and computer security consultants. Indeed, one can almost hear the champagne bottles being uncorked at the corporate headquarters of major anti-virus vendors. As someone once said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

However, Mr. Dohnert took his arguement one step further and suggested that IE's continuing security problems might lead to it being abandoned totally by users. Personally, I doubt that. I have many Windows-using friends who have suffered repeated virus attacks - their email address books have been hijacked, their machine was made into a spam zombie, and their hard drive became a repository of warez, all without their knowledge. And what did they do about it when they finally discovered the problem? Nothing. As long as they can boot, surf the web and send an email to grandma, everything is fine. Downloading and installing a security patch is just too much trouble.