Good for you, PayPal
by Duncan Parry
Good for them I say - the more users are warned about security risks, the better. To quote the Computing.co.uk article:
In a white paper, PayPal said that "letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts".
Site visitors using old browsers may just seem like an oddity of the web. However, as PayPal have noted, they can be a threat to security - they have bugs that may leak the user's personal data (including passwords and credit card info).
I started to ask myself why users still have old browsers like IE3 and IE4 - and thought of all those old PCs donated to Africa. Do they still have old browsers, because newer versions are too resource-intensive? Probably. What will happen to these users if this becomes a common decision by security-conscious sites? Are there poorly-funded libraries with old PCs still using IE4 (a colleague just told me about one using IE 5.5 in Central London)?
I still feel that blocking old browsers is the right thing to do on sites requiring a high level of security (e.g banks) - but attention needs to be paid to older computers used in other countries, too.










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