Question: should I update IE to 8 even if I never use it?

[marzsyndrome]

This thought occured to me just now: as I'm slowly preparing a custom XP SP3 CD for myself, I notice I haven't included any IE8 addon(s) so far.

Now I'm firmly a Firefox user these days, even going as far lately as sticking to the portable version from PortableApps so that I can keep the program and all my settings and cache in one convenient folder. There's a chance I'll use a program to remove the IE browser from my system (or at the very least get rid of all shortcuts and associations with it), and/or just keep the old IE6 files hidden away. Now the question remains: should I still replace 6 with 8 purely for security purposes or up-to-date system files? Or even both?

I await your suggestions.

[bphlpt]

There are two trains of thought:

1) Pull out every last vestige of IE and throw it away. FDV over at Wincert has made some posts to help folks who want to do this. He fine tuned the approach for Win2K, but I think he made some similar progress for XP, but I haven't looked very closely at his posts lately and he's not on much any more either. Look in the HFSLIP sub forum for his posts if you want to try and pursue that.

2) If you're not going to pull it all out, then my opinion is that you should keep it as completely up to date as you possibly can, even if you don't plan on using IE. As Windows OS have progressed from 98 => 2000 => XP, more and more of the files used by IE are also used by other parts of the OS, so you might as well block up all possible known holes for your own safety.

Cheers and Regards

[dumpydooby]

Definitely. Go raw doggin' the internet and you're gonna get pozzed.

[ricktendo64]

png, js and inf are just a few things that benefit from having ie8

jscript.dll
advpack.dll
pngfilt.dll

[5eraph]

True, rick. Though javascript and Visual BASIC script hosts can be brought up to IE7 levels and secured with KB955360 and KB2510581 if marzsyndrome chooses to remove IE altogether.

Nevermind. XPx86SP3 includes Windows Scripting Host 5.7, unlike XPx64SP2.

My opinion: Removing IE core breaks many things. It's better for me to update it and not use IE. The following code in WinNT.sif should remove most shortcuts.

Code: Select all

[Components]
IEAccess="Off"

[tomasz86]

Avtually, there may be one reason for not upgrading Internet Explorer. IE is responsible for Windows Explorer interface and older versions of IE are faster than the newer ones. It does make difference when you use it on a very old hardware.

Of course, removing IE totally (FDV) is even better in such a case but sometimes you just have to use IE, ex. for ActiveX support.

By the way, Script 8 can be used with IE6 too (see unofficial version for W2K). You just have to replace the files manually. It's also much faster than the older versions. I myself have to use IE for certain sites and the difference in speed is huge.

[RyanVM]

I would keep IE as up to date as possible mainly because the IE engine is embedded in other things as well (via mshtml.ocx), so you may end up using it whether you know it or not.

[bphlpt]

I guess the general theme here, marzsyndrome, is we believe that you should update IE and keep it as up to date as possible, assuming you have reasonably recent hardware. With today's hardware, speed, memory, and disk size, it just doesn't make as much sense to remove things as it used to. If you have older hardware as tomasz86 mentioned, then it might make sense to do things a little different. In that case, using Win2K with all the work that FDV, tomasz86, BlackWingCat, WildBill, and Bristols have done might even be a better option to get the best performance out of older hardware while remaining as safe as possible. But that is not a job for the faint of heart. It all boils down to your individual needs and abilities.

Cheers and Regards