In today’s “Dear Microsoft,” I’m going to make a request about IE.
You see, I find Internet Explorer to be a perfectly secure and safe browser when used properly. For instance, I don’t run as Administrator unless I’m doing something that requires those privileges (and I usually just use Run As).
But more important, I think, is the way in which I’ve employed IE’s “Security Zones” feature. I have my Internet Zone set up so that “Active Scripting” is disabled, along with “Scripting of ActiveX controls” (approved or otherwise). For most sites, this doesn’t give me a problem.
For those that do need those features, I add them to the Trusted Zone, which allows such functions. These include sites like passport.com (and .net), msn.com, hotmail.com, and a host of message boards that I read.
Message boards (particularly the comment-posting fields and things like that) seem to employ scripting a lot.
The biggest problem with working like this is that it is WAY too tedious and difficult to add sites to the Trusted Zone.
So what’s my request? Well I have a few. And they don’t involve changing the IE engine… just the interface pretty much.
1) Give us a menu entry AND a toolbar button for adding sites to the Trusted Zone. Or to any zone. Perhaps an “Add to zone” button J
2) Let us make our own custom zones (like “message boards zone”, etc.)
3) Give IE a “lockdown” button. When you click it, the info bar or some other indicator could tell you “IE Lockdown is enabled. Some sites may not work properly, click here for more information”. Or better yet, instead of that… just have a “global” security setting that can easily be changed from the main browser window (high/medium/low, etc.). Something along those lines could help those who aren’t up to using Zones.
Right now, IE supports a pretty good system for safely browsing the web (via security zones). However, it makes it far too difficult to actually use! And I’ve yet to see a browser add-on that fixes this. This is something Microsoft should add directly into the browser. When you first run it, the new browser should inform you that security settings for the Internet Zone have been set to High. Use the Information Bar to guide users to the “Add to zone” button when a page may be unnecessarily restricted by those settings. You can even give the option during install to add known trustworthy sites to the Trusted Zone (msn, passport, yahoo, amazon, google, and whoever else might need to be there) – just don’t do that without giving the user an OPTION during install, otherwise someone will think you’re trying to sneak something by them.