Tuesday, December 4th 2007
Microsoft Says Internet Explorer More Secure Than Firefox
Jeff Jones, Security Strategy Director at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, following his recent report putting Windows Vista ahead of Linux and Mac OS X for security, has now placed Internet Explorer ahead of the open source Firefox browser in a long-term comparative study. According to his analysis, fewer security vulnerabilities needed fixing in Internet Explorer than in the competition. Jones explains in his report Browser Vulnerability Analysis (PDF), that Mozilla has fixed 199 security vulnerabilities since November 2004, when Firefox first appeared, of which 75 were critical, 100 medium and 24 of low importance. Over the same period, a total of 87 security vulnerabilities were fixed in Internet Explorer, of which 54 were critical, 28 medium and 5 of low importance. He also notes that security updates are currently only being released for version 2.0 of Firefox, while Microsoft provides full support for earlier versions of Internet Explorer.
Source:
heise Security
40 Comments on Microsoft Says Internet Explorer More Secure Than Firefox
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Just from my own personal experience - I've never run into any security problems with IE7, and very few when I was still on IE6. I only use one anti-malware/firewall program, and it never has to throw a "HALT!!" window at me. Once a week, I run 3 seperate scanners and they never return anything.
The only "issue" I have with IE is having to clean out the temp internet files folder every now and then, songs and vids that have been loaded up take a ton of space.
I tried FF, and honestly didn't like the way it displayed webpages, sometimes paragraphs were overlapped, pictures weren't aligned properly; and don't get me started on how it displays tables . . . but, I've known some people who've had just as many problems with FF as others claim to have with IE.
On a side note: personally, IMO, I truly believe the vast number of people who aren't too keen on tech issues lend a lot of problems to IE7's reputability. There are a lot of people that either completely forget that software needs to be updated occasionally, or they just blatantly ignore it (I've met some people who completely disable Windows/Microsoft Update because they think it means MS can steal personal information off your computer; or are afraid that hackers will break into their PC and steal all their cooking recipes and pr0n0) - whereas a good majority of people running FF have at least a lot better idea of how to keep their rigs running in perfect shape.
It's like the amount of people that complain about their cars being worthless POSes, but never read the owner's manual or never ask someone how to properly maintain it or they think it'll never break down . . . then you've got all the people that either work on cars for a living or a hobby, or make an effort to maintain it because they know better, or do the research themself because they don't want to throw $x down the drain. Whose vehicles do you think end up in the shop more, and it has nothing really to do with vehicle brand?
Also, people like to rail against Fudzilla and Inquirer, yet they don't realize how hard it is to track down factual and honest IT related news on a daily basis.
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