Internet Explorer has fewer security holes than Firefox
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, Firefox, Security, Internet, Microsoft on
You type most of your passwords into it - and you type your credit card details into it every time you shop online. It’s how you unlock an iPhone so you can install applications on it. It’s the home of many of your applications and it’s the first avenue of attack for most malware. Really, if you wanted to be secure, you might never use a Web browser again.
You don’t have to be a hacker in the criminal sense to want to get around some security lockdowns. The latest iPhone cracker uses an image security issue in the Safari browser to open the system up. If you have a Buffalo NAS box you can use a security hole in the Web administration interface to make yourself root to install Perl so you can run SlimServer and get music onto your Squeezebox. I’d like to run SlimServer on something other than our main server - but I’m not cracking the security on our backup and media store to do it.
I’ve never switched away from IE to Firefox; originally it was because I had to have IE on my system for work and didn’t want the hassle of managing two browsers. Since IE 7 came out and I found IE 7 Pro I just haven’t bothered. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for me. Given that it took me five hours of browsing dubious sites and downloading known spyware to infect a machine running XP SP2 when I tried a few years ago, and given that everything that interested me in Firefox turned out to be Greasemonkey scripts (and I’m probably unfair to carry on thinking of that as a security problem waiting to happen, but I do), I’ve been assuming the security (dis)honours are about equal.
Jeff Jones at Microsoft has done another vulnerability survey, this time for IE and Firefox. Since Firefox 1.0 came out in November 2004, Mozilla has patched a total of 199 bugs: 75 high severity, 100 medium severity, 24 low severity. Microsoft has only patched 87 IE bugs in the same time (and we’re assuming fewer bugs patched is a good thing rather than avoiding the problem): 54 high, 28 medium and 5 low severity. Honours are more equal comparing just Firefox 2 and IE 7 for known bugs that haven’t been fixed: eight high severity bugs for Firefox versus ten for IE, 15 medium severity bugs
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