Microsoft must abandon IE

Let's face it, IE is great and fast (despite the biased claims other webbrowsers make, I have seen detailed benchmarks that prove 95% of the time, IE is faster than any other browser).  But because of it's flexibility and features, has been open to many malicious and system comprimising critial holes.

The current hole is another massive "take over your computer/steal your life" hole and it's press covereage is worse than any computer hole to date (well maybe not bigger than Blaster.. yet).  While MS has released a patch (well it's really a work around, the REAL patch won't come out for months, as officially announced by MS) but that doesn't fix the PR problems MS is facing.  With every new exploit for Windows/IE, the press has gotten more aggressive and opinions have become harsher harsher but I realized that MS must abandon IE when just today I read that the Dept of Homeland Security (of the US) publicly announced today that you should not run IE.  It was bad enough when CERT just a couple days ago said people need to stop running IE but now we have mainstream US government speaking against IE.

Despite how well MS fixes IE with XP SP2 (although Win2000 users are still left hopeless and Win2003 users won't see a similar patch until early Winter 2004) it won't change the fact that "IE is insecure" is becoming a phrase that even people without computers are hearing.

This is bad, in the past I admit no coder is perfect, and that bugs (which lead to exploits) happen, but with IE/Windows being so closely watched as it is, we just have a flood of problems being discovered.  This is no longer acceptable and MS needs to internally and eventually publicly admit this.  While they could write the slickest IE ever and call it IE7 you will still have the overtones that IE is forever screwed.

At this point MS should rename IE, while it might be ok if they really got serious and wrote some insane secure layers and called it "IE with Lockbox technology" or similar, I think they would be better off renaming IE outright.  Of course I'm implying that MS secure the heck out of IE, not just change the name.  But despite what you think on MS vs Security, there's no question in my mind that MS has lost the PR war, IE will forever be seen as the browser that got hacked, over and over again.