Here we go again. Another serious security flaw has been discovered in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser which allows hackers to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords via websites that contain malicious code. The vulnerability is present in all versions of IE, Microsoft says.

Experts are advising users of IE to use an alternative browser instead, but of course Microsoft are against such drastic measures, claiming that it isn’t recommended for just one flaw and that they’re working on an emergency fix.

There are a few problems here, though. The first is that many internet users still aren’t aware of alternative web browsers such as Firefox or Opera. According to W3C statistics, 46.6% of internet users use IE to browse the web as of November this year. Whilst alternative browsers, particularly Firefox, are slowly leveling the playing field, that’s still a lot of people using IE that are put unnecessarily at risk. Guaranteed, the message isn’t going to get out to even a quarter of these people, and probably much less than that.

The second issue is that Internet Explorer has a history with this sort of thing. A security hole is found, it’s exploited, Microsoft fix it, and the process is repeated. IE is a ticking time bomb as many of us know, but even more remain unaware.

Thirdly, Microsoft simply cannot push out fixes and updates fast enough. With so many people using IE on the internet, it’s such a massive target for hackers, and an easy target at that. At a developer conference in Sydney last month, CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at the possibility of using WebKit for a future version of IE. A shift to the open source rendering engine would not only speed up security fixes and updates, but would also mean that IE would finally be standards compliant, and would be able to change much easier as web standards change.

We live in hope.