Microsoft security chief uses Firefox
Microsoft's head of security, Stephen Toulouse, has accidentally revealed that he uses Firefox. In an interview with Wired here, Toulouse was chatting about how security was an industry wide problem and not Internet Explorer specific. Then he mentioned that only that morning he had to download an upgrade to Firefox to block a flaw that would've allowed an attacker to run a program on his system. While he meant to point out how other browsers have the same problems as IE, he just happened to reveal that he surfs using the rival browser. Of course it is unlikely that he does not find IE a particularly secure proposition and there must be a really good reason he has Firefox on his computer.
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6 Comments
This is all silly mis-reporting - quite funny though. There is a difference between having something installed on your computer and actually using it or thinking it's a good product.
If you look through various blogs for the Mozilla community, you will find that many of the Mozilla folks have talked about using IE - if they have it and are not installing the updates for it, then that's pretty dumb. In fact, anyone who is responsible for a website is being pretty dumb if they don't test it in IE.
Comment by Michael Lefevre at September 2, 2004 04:35 PM | PermalinkJust like Asa runs Opera and IE every now and then, he probably runs Firefox and Opera sometimes.
Comment by Ernst Persson at September 2, 2004 05:21 PM | PermalinkI have both Opera and Internet Explorer installed(plus the Mozilla suite) which I actively maintain, but the only browser I _use_ is Firefox.
To leap from "MS Security chief has Firefox installed" to "MS Security chief uses Firefox" is just petty and childish.(not to mention apparently incorrect)
He obviously didn't try this - http://www.nd.edu/~jsmith30/xul/test/spoof.html
Comment by Bill Gates at September 8, 2004 12:19 PM | PermalinkLots of people at Microsoft use browsers other than IE. Some use other browsers exclusively, others use them once in a while or for a specific reason. There is no corporate edict to use IE for browsing, nor would our corporate culture really allow for such a thing.
Further, people on the IE team use lots of different browsers (IE based and not IE based), plug-ins, toolbars, etc.. I'm one of the development managers on the IE team, focusing on the user interface. It would be downright stupid of me to solely use IE for browsing. Today I'm using Firefox, mostly. I like how Pluck integrates with IE for RSS feeds, so I've been using that configuration a lot as well.
Maxthon is an excellent IE based browser. I'm not at all surprised (or disappointed) that Stephen uses it as his browser of choice. It has lots of features that IE itself does not.
He's since claimed he was misquoted and that although he keeps lots of browsers on his computer his chosen browser is IE6 SP2 with Maxthon shell.