Is The Firefox Honeymoon Over?

prostoalex writes "With Firefox market share reaching a substantial level, is the popular Internet browser becoming a security nightmare for IT administrators? George Ou takes a look at the hard numbers. From the article: 'From March 2005 to September 2005 10 vulnerabilities were published for Microsoft Internet Explorer, 40 for Mozilla Firefox. In April-September timespan there were 6 exploits for MSIE, 11 for Firefox. Conclusion? As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading. It just goes to prove that any popular software worth hacking that has security vulnerabilities will eventually have to deal with live working exploits. Firefox mostly managed to stay under the radar from hackers before April of 2005.'"

Comments

Some information is actually missing

[Z00L00K]

and that is about the severity of the security issues.

Anyway, maybe it's time to switch to Opera or Lynx now. Or maybe tkWWW... Does anybody know of any other browser out there that may be usable on a variety of OS:es???

Re:Quality not Quantity

[truthsearch]

Another reason his statistics are useless: He ignores all past unfixed vulnerabilities. Before Microsoft forced the removal of the pages from the internet last year, there were 20+ documented old IE bugs. Many of these existed for over a year and still may not be fixed today. Mentioning 10 recent announcements is irrelevant when there are twice as many older vulnerabilities which still haven't been fixed.

Your #1 point is definitely the most important. There is no way to know exactly how vulnerable IE is. At least with an open source browser we don't have to believe the word of one closed group.