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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.'"
There is one significant difference. I'm a knowledgable user. I program and sys-admin. I practice good security. Regardless of the number of exploits out there, I've never been hit by a FF exploit. I have been hit by IE exploits.
But the submitter is right. Though code security is important, the number of users is also a huge factor.
Cue someone to mention Apache.
Yes, Apache is everywhere, exploit-free. So are lots and lots of other binaries. It's only when you compare Apache to IIS 4/5 that it's really such a perfect example. Compare it to WinAMP, or Bash, or Finder, and its no more, no less secure.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Well, this is a good example of bad journalism. I don't want to get into a flame ware about which browser is more secure (although I have an obvious bias). What I'm try to say is that this guy is quoting useless statistics and this is a great example of bad science/tech reporting in the media.
1) The number of vulnerabilities reported has almost nothing to do with the number in the code. At most it dictates a minimum number that exist. Perhaps the firefox community is much more active at searching for bugs in the much newer firefox code.
3) How effective are the fixes? MS seems to have the same recurring problems because they only do triage. They don't fix the bigger problem (VERY poor browser design). The firefox team appears to address the bigger problem, not just stop the current bleeding.
2) How critical are these vulnerabilities. The article makes no mention of any ranking. He lumps everything into the same category. MANY of the IE bugs over the last 5 years have been SUPER critical, allowing remote access with little or no user intervention and no settings work around. Are the fire fox bugs the same?
3) Different organizations handle the vulnerabilities: MS and the Mozilla Foundation. MS is known to sit on bugs as long as possible. Perhaps the Firefox team is just being more responsive to the people looking for them.
Remember 99% of people that have cancer have eaten pickles. That doesn't tell you squat about the relationship of pickles and cancer.
IAAITG (I am a IT guy)
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
As well, how many of these vulnerabilities/exploits were "critical" and how severely did they expose your computer to running unauthorized code vs. the MS ones? How much effort did it take to repair them? The last vulnerability I recall patching required making a minor change to my Firefox config by hand rather than patching or upgrading.
Because IE is so tied in not only to the OS, but to various Visual Studio API's, were Microsoft's vulnerabilities more far-reaching?
I'm no MS apologist, but I'm also not a Linux or OSS zealot. I like to use what works best for my needs and habits, which ends up being a mix of Closed Source and Open Source products. I don't want to be biased on one side or another, but I'd like to be sure that comparisons like this are apples to apples.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
This is Slashdot! You're not allowed to talk about Mozilla like that!!!
I use it because its a better browser. It has more (and better) features than the competition. THAT is why I use it and recommend it to those who ask, not because of its security track record.
Another in a series of stories that seem to be written to raise the ire of /.'ers. You're smarter than this, fellow reader. Do not give in to the temptation to flame on. We all know better.
Sad that the writer didn't.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
don't mean anything unless you do a side by side comparison of the security holes. What is the severity of each bug? Clearly, there is more activity and work in finding and actually fixing bugs in FF than there ever could be in IE, which could in and of itself account for the higher numbers.
Yes there are a lot of problems with firefox, its being developed so there are going to be vulnerabilities and security problems, but at least its constantly being developed. When everyone moves over to Vista and uses the new version of IE for Vista its going to be the same old crap all over again and im sure that IE will once again have more problems then firefox.
Here's the difference.
If the Firefox web browser sucks, the average Joe can uninstall that web browser from a Windows box....
if IE sucks...
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Remember the age of the code though, how long has IE been around as compared to firefox. I would expect that about 6 years of sniffing thru firefox will result in less exploits that the amount thats still found in IE
Is still more fun than coming up with relevant comments.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
1. How many Critical IE vs Firefox
2. How fast where patches/new versions deployed
3. How many days was the browser open to the exploit
And Finally
4. Total number of days browser was exploitable - IE vs Firefox
I bet you will find issues in IE that are not even patched yet, turnaround for more Firefox issues however? In most cases a solution within hours a patch within days.
Personal Website
Also, the number of security flaws reported is meaningless. A security hole could be very serious, or completely inconsequential.
And by the way, the article is extremely short, and doesn't actually give much useful info beyond what was in the slashdot summary, so please think twice before clicking through to TFA and steering ad revenue to zdnet.
Find free books.
I read thru some of Ou's other blogs, and I have to say he seems to be a MS Troll.
It seems to me that MS simply won't patch certain things in IE. They haven't from the very beginning. Firefox is pretty new and will always have more security issues early on. Seems simple to me.
bluespaceradio.com - New Wave, Indie and Alternative
Yes, the honeymoon is over, and now the more enjoyable adventure of building a life together begins.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The number of vulnerabilities and exploits make some difference, but what about the average time it takes to fix the vulnerabilities? If one takes an average of 2 weeks and the other 2 days, I'd rather have the latter.
It's still more secure than IE.
You make a powerful argument. I'm daunted at the prospect of countering it. I think I'll back down in the face of your intellectual prowess.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
They should have separated vulnerabilities into classes then also taken into account the average time between discovery and fix and ease of patching. Anyone one of such a study?
What I'm try to say is that this guy is quoting useless statistics and this is a great example of bad science/tech reporting in the media.
0 219783
AMEN! Your pickles example is a good reminder of the confusion many Americans have over causality vs. correlation.
Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best is an excellent primer in the dangers of poorly used and cited statistics. It's a must read:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
For me, it's not the number of vulnerabilities and never was. I, like most other people, used IE because it was preinstalled. I was lazy and figured "a browser's a browser". Only once I started using other browsers did I realize:
1. There is no reason a browser should lock your operating system.
2. There is no reason a browser should mysteriously slow down your computer.
3. There is no reason a browser should purposefully make it difficult to change some settings.
It's like the Messenger service that Microsoft seems DETERMINED to re-enable on my computer every time I update / patch. I know what settings I want, and the browser that lets me use those settings with a minimum of issues is the one I'll use. This isn't loyalty. It's a user-friendly program that doesn't pretend to believe it knows what I want better than I do.
It's great that as a sysadmin/programmer using firefox, you've had less problems than with IE.
More importantly, when I switch my users to Firefox, they cease to have problems. More exploits or not, FF causes fewer headaches. When it's all said and done, I'll choose FF's problems over IE's problems.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Thanks, Steve. It's nice to see you're still paying attention to things over here.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
This is exactly true. I administer over 2,000 machines (mixed platform environment). We started installing Firefox as part our standard package over a year ago. There has never been one report of a problem with security involving Mozilla Firefox. There have, in the same time period, been numerous security problems originating in the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. It doesn't matter how many exploits get published if they aren't being exploited or their exploit does not result in any significant harm. As posters below have noted, this article is a result of bad journalism.
Anybody who wants to inspect the source code for security holes can do so.
Precisely. But why do you assume that once the bug is found, it will be fixed? If the bug is found by a malicisous pair of eyes, an exploit will be written instead.
Open source helps both the attackers and defenders, and thereore does not have an inherent advantage in security, in my opinion. Now, the formerly closed code that has leaked is indeed more vulnerable after the leak.
I would like to see a comparison of the seriousness of the vulnerabilities - how many of those IE exploits gave remote users full control over the victims computer, vs those of Firefox? Given that IE is so deeply tied into the OS, security problems with it tend to be much worse. For Firefox, the vulnerabilities tend to be trivial, such as browser crashes.
"I set MSN Search as my default search engine on Firefox"
I set my Firefox home page to open MSN search with the default search strings "openoffice.org google 'how do I replace microsoft windows with linux?'".
It's the little things that make life enjoyable.
I think these reports give the answer.
Firefox
Internet Explorer
To conclude firefox has three unpatched advisories of which the most severe is less critical. IE has nineteen unpatched advisories of which the most severe is highly critical. Notice that actually IE had more advisories both patched and unpatched.
What I find most fascinating is that no one seems willing to recognize that the more users you have, the greater the interest in hacking becomes. If you have a paltry penetration for your technology, hackers ignore you.
Now, is Firefox more secure? In theory it should be. Are the exploits in Firefox less problematic? Well, until hackers care to exploit it, who the heck really knows? I remember when Firefox pop-up blocking worked. Now, there are known methods to circumvent the technology...go figure...the folks who care have found new methods because Firefox was eating their lunch.
Now, I heard someone say that Apache is a model...what about all those worms that have been attacking, and defeating, Apache for the last 3 years (slapper, scalper, etc.)? Apache's only grace is that the developers move FAST when a new exploit is found. However, most attacks are not day zero attacks, which means that the vast majority of attacks are based on known, patched or patchable flaws.
So, it is incumbent on any admin to keep their systems up-to-date AND recognize that patch management is one of the key hallmarks of a secure system.
What does this mean for Firefox? Same patch management must be implemented for Firefox as should be in place for Exploder. Moreover, perimeter firewalls and intrusion detection systems must be in place and up-to-date themselves. And even with this diligence, per the CSI FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey 2005, 95% of Enterprises experienced system penetration and 55% were attacked by worms or viri.
Guess what? Software development methodology is not a panacea anymore than anything else.
Diligence, not arrogance, will protect your computing assets.
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
The most important thing this author should have asked is: what is the severity of these vulnerabilities? Something like a DoS is a PITA, but compared to a vulerability that opens a machine to remote system access-- come on! Let's compare: IE Firefox
IE integrated into the base OS gives a lot of those buffer overflows much more destructive potential than some regular old program. I'm not ruling FF out as a potential threat, but so far, it has shown itself to be far less dangerous than IE.
Also.. the most important factor. The Firefox community fixes the problems.
There are flaws in IE that have been known for better than 6-8 months and still there is no fix.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it. Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand. If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
I find it very interesting that 9 times out of 10, if I ask someone why they use Firefox, the response is "Tabbed Browsing" or "It's not Microsoft."
As a developer, I have found Firefox to be almost unusable in many instances:
1) They implemented CSS, but none of the old CSS. This means when you change a cursor to a "hand", it won't recognize it.
2) It also leaves you unable to create custom variables in HTML tags. This leaves out ease of use in dynamic information systems.
3) You cannot call a style of an document object directly, you must first call the object, then on a seperate line, call that object's style you want. Just plain inefficient.
4) You cannot use span tags or div tags even remotely how you can in IE (and some cases even in Safari!).
5) They took out many Javascript functionalities because they simply couldn't implement them correctly. (.focus())!
In the end, it's frustrating that in Firefox you must deal with coding around what they left out, because it's more "secure", and as we now know, it's not even more secure! And thank you to Firefox for making me have to download a plug-in every time I want something to work like it should. It's just not what everyone seems to think it is. Is it just an excuse to name drop something new??
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
They have been at it over ten years, and still new bugs keep coming. With more cash than some countries, there is no excuse for any new exploits by your logic.
1) Firefox is newer, it's code is less mature.
2) The entire world is privy to the source code of Firefox, the more exploits initially is good for open source. That means their getting fixed faster too.
3) What these 'known exploits' are, is people reviewing that code finding faults and reporting them. Since the code is readily available this makes it easier and quicker. This is a good thing. Closed source makes it harder to find the bugs, they tend to be found out by exploit, more often than review.
4) All bugs are not the same, a bug in an option is not the same as a bug in something that can't be turned off. Severity of the bug was compared here, as has been pointed out numerous time this is dumb.
5) Money is a reason to hide exploits and fix them only when absolutely necessary. When you donate time and effort freely, pride in your work provides the opposite motivation.
6) You can uninstall firefox and use something else, try that with IE.p
I mean, From March 2005 to September 2005 ?! Good god, I thought ignorance could no longer make me mad, but yes, it can. Educate us please, 1) how many versions of IE were released in this timespan, 2) how many vulnerabilities were disclosed about IE6 since it was released, 3) how many vulnerabilities had IE when it had the same [release] age as Firefox has now, 4) how does the patch release speed of Firefox and IE compare, 5) how does the feature set of Firefox and IE compare, 6) how does the size, stability, platform support, plugin support of Firefox and IE compare, 7) how many vulnerabilties of IE's and how many of Firefox's were/could in fact be exploited by worms and trojans in this period.
I could go on with this, but for me, even these questions are more important, by a magnitude, than how many exploits were discovered.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I really want to give Firefox to all my users, but there's no good way of managing the updates for my users. Until the Firefox comes packaged as an MSI so that I can force an upgrade via Group Policy, I won't install it on my users machines. And when they do make an MSI for it, how am I to keep people up-to-date with extensions? The Grease Monkey extension had a vulnerability awhile back, and I don't see a way for Firefox to allow me to force an upgrade to everyone for extensions. IE works well because I can release patches for it via WSUS. And since SP2 for XP, we've had less calls about spy/adware installs.
Knowledgable? Practice good security? I'd say the same about myself, and I've *NEVER* been hit by an IE exploit.
I'd say a fundamental part of good practice with IE is to use it with an HTML rewriter. I use "The Proxomitron".
Firefox ... is the popular Internet browser becoming a security nightmare for IT administrators
Not a statement of fact but by asking it as a question you give the meme credibility. Get those ad servers warmed up.As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading.
Really, need some straw?[statistics of vulnerabilities provided without context] ... It just goes to prove that any popular software worth hacking that has security vulnerabilities will eventually have to deal with live working exploits.
Oh, I see you are already building your straw man. What was your point again... FF is no better than IE so don't bother trying to use it? Nice. Not sure which is worse, the the zdnet Microsoft shill or this poseur inciting a flame war to embiggen ad server revenues. Bravo, your internship at FoxNews is waiting.Speak truth to power.
It just goes to prove that any popular software worth hacking that has security vulnerabilities will eventually have to deal with live working exploits.
What can I say? I pity the administrator that need "proof" to realize this.
Straight to the "Security 101" class you go, as you should have before getting a job.
Or if not having one, thank god for that.
As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading.
Here's the hard facts according to Secunia...
IE 6: 19 of 85 unpatched issues, the most severe classed Highly Critical.
Firefox 1.x: 3 of 22 unpatched issues, the most severe classed Less Critical.
Opera 8.x: 0 of 7 unpatched issues.
I don't know about you, but as long as a product is auto-updating (which the Firefox 1.5 beta and onwards indeed is, like IE 6, and unlike Opera 8), what does it matter how many exploits are found? Isn't it how many issues you're affected by that matters?
Yes, this was a problem with Firefox before 1.5 as you can't excuse having to manually upgrade your browser while monitoring security sites (at least not from the audience Firefox is targeting), and that's why I recommend people to upgrade to 1.5 ASAP. The minor instabilities still present from being in beta isn't as bad as missing out security fixes.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
security defects aside, i've had firefox crash on me at least twice a DAY in the last year or so.
annoying as it may be, it's still less annoying than the alternative
Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. As you assert, there doesn't seem to be (m)any people actually getting their system compromised from Firefox issues. Contrast that with IE, where we have seen numerous exploits in the wild which install malware, simply from the user visiting a web site. In large part, I believe this is due to IE's integration with the base operating systm.
Let's go through your objections point by point
If this is so it just leads to the question: Why should people use Firefox now then? Lets wait until 2010 when it will actually be better and stick to IE which is better now.
Except then Firefox will not get developed to as high a level as IE has and will never reach that point. Note that this observer has the same problem as most observers who say, "It's better!" And that problem is that the numbers aren't exactly fairly proportioned. An IE hack that gives someone access to all your 'net data then wipes your entire hard drive is counted as one bug, as is a firefox flaw that gives someone access to your last ten sites viewed. That's a biased and unfounded example, but the reality stands regardless - THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DO A SECURITY STUDY.
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
It is arguing against the further development of Firefox, too. No users, no development.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it.
There's piles of things wrong with IE, they're just not user-visible all the time and that is a main portion of the problem's gestalt.
Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
You can lock Firefox down if you want. Won't be able to see EVERYTHING, but it will definitely be secure. Not quite anywhere near as true with IE.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand.
You can do this in linux. Natively. Just make yourself a different user with no rights to do certain things. Try that in Windows and see if it works for you. As to the, "Microsoft will solve everything in the end" mentality, well, I can't really argue with that.
If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Microsoft is behind and has been so for a very long time. The stuff you want is part of the problem with their occasional 'buy instead of implement' business model.
My little site.
"Fundamental" as in "never heard of by anyone else"?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Should there be any surprise?
IE6 has been out for 4 years and built on code that has been used for many years before that. With no significant features being added to IE6 and two major service packs it would seem that the software should be (at this time) very secure. Its still not.
Firefox has been out for less than a year. Given the age, it would stand to reason that it would have more bugs that need to be fixed. With time, it would be anticipated these will reduce.
Firefox has more features and higher degree of compatibility with standards -- I'd expect these would introduce bugs as well that need to be fixed.
Firefox does not have access to the resources Microsoft has (some of the best developers, huge amount of capital, sophisticated testing facilities and networks, etc..) and as a result, it would be expected there are more bugs, etc..
Firefox is available for a wider range of platforms. Given this variance, it would be anticipated more bugs would occur as a result.
The source to Firefox is freely available. As a result, it is very possible for a wider amount of people to look at the code and find bugs MUCH easier than with IE. As a result, more bugs should be reported.
I could go on and on and on.. but needless to say, the fact there are more security/bug reports shouldn't be that big of a surprise. The biggest question is if the fundamental architecture of the software keeps security issues minor and if the development team is capable of keeping their software secure in a quick and efficient manner.
I think it is pretty clear from looking at the links provided in the article that this indeed is the case. The vulnerabilities are far less critical, there are less outstanding issues, etc..
I'm curious how the picture will change a year or two down the road.. IE has been pretty consistent with security issues -- I really expect Firefox security issues to decline.
So they found more exploits to FF. FF is also newer. Does this mention the hundreds of IE exploits in the back catalog? Does this mention some of the fatal flaws that MS has not repaired since IE 5? I know because I have had to hack fixes for web apps in IE... never had to do it for Firefox. Read through MSDN and count all the bugs, then read through Bugzilla.
Any new product will have more flaws found per month than an existing product. This is common sense. The difference with FF is the turn around of the fixes. You could imply as much from the article. 40 down to 11. Notice how IE6 has the same amount still found (10 and 6 are alot closer than 40 and 11), and it is a product that has been on the market how long( 4 years)?
There is no news here, just FUD and a normal software lifecycle. This is perfectly normal.
So what makes these people think that because IE has fewer fixes going in, they have fewer problems to start with?
Remember that Firefox has far more people looking at the code base for errors - so fixes generated are for problems people have seen in code that can cause an issue, even if in practice they might never be used for an exploit.
Meanwhile in IE you have fewer people just looking over the code for errors, so patches that come out are likley because someone, somewhere, is actually USING that hole right this second!!
Then look at the numbers for patches and see if using IE doesn't just creep you out in all sorts of ways.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You need only to look at secunia.com's summaries to see through the idiocy of this article:
vs.
Firefox: 0% Extremely Critical
IE: 14% Extremley Critical
Need we say more?
Are you saying that knowledgable users necessarily get hit, even on IE? I develop on Windows (and on Linux too, though my architectural understanding of Win32 exceeds Linux (which is pretty much limited to POSIX)) and you know what? I've never had a problem with an IE exploit in my life. Like someone else said a few stories ago, a user who knows what he's doing can make even Win98 safe.
Yes, IE pre-XPSP2 UI+security model of Yes by default and ActiveX definitely required vigilance; but today it's a function of user skill on both Firefox and IE to *not* be infected.
Someone here mentioned their users don't have problems with Firefox. Well, disabling ActiveX certainly helps. But if Firefox users visit RandomScreenSaver.tld and download with abandon (as many IE users do), compromising Firefox will be a piece of cake. And there is the gaping hole in Firefox's armor -- even many of its biggest boosters think nothing of installing unsigned extensions.
Btw, I'm not sure anyone who developed on Apache through the late 90s would call it 'exploit free' in the sense (say) vsftpd is exploit free. Apache's strength is cross-platform ubiquity and a rich plugin environment, not perf or security. I doubt any Apache dev would claim Apache to be unexploitable even today.
Go somewhere random
There are flaws in IE that have been known for better than 6-8 months and still there is no fix.
Ok, sure... I'll bite. I don't buy it. Name ONE risky security flaw that has been known for 6 months without being patched by Microsoft.
Oh please, not again. "Firefox has more security bugs! firefox is teh evil! omgomgomg" /. comment, but from a STORY SUBMISSION?
I'd expect this kind of comments from a
In any case I already know the answer: "more bugs, but some less critical, and all patched in less time".
Or am I wrong?
Honeymoon is over because the FF people fixed more security bugs than IE6? I don't follow.
sic transit gloria mundi
Since Ou is too much of a prude to post the links to the exploits, can anyone here post them so we can get a better understanding of what the real differences are behind the different exploits?
ôó
I am SOOO tired of seeing these stories about how firefox has this many bugs vs IE has this many blah blah blah....
They totally miss the point.
First off, anybody who switched to firefox because they thought it (or any other browser) was "safer" than any IE is totally deluding themselves. The fact is the web is just a dangerous place to be, and no browser no matter how "bug-free" or "tested" can ever really protect you. If you are an idiot and go to phishing sites or places that give you spyware or whatever, you deserve what you get.
the reason to use firefox is because it is a BETTER browser. It's hard for me to overstate just how awesome tabbed browsing is, but that feature by itself convinced me. That, and it's 100% free.
what else do you really need?
so the bottom line is, all browsers are unsafe, pick the one that you can use most effectively.
For me, that's firefox.
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
"the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues [...]"
It's not a product specific issue. Diversity is the cure to monoculture security blues. The more mainstream a product becomes, the more malicious users will target it. And if it's the only game in town it might as well have a big bullseye pinned on it.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
I'll give you not one but 19.
http://secunia.com/product/11/
Watch what you ask for, you just might get it.
Vulnerabilities are a product of mistakes on the part of the people who write the code. The number of bugs in a piece of code is a function of the experience, skill, and coding/QC practices of the programmer(s) who wrote that code.
There is no relationship between popularity and vulnerabilities in software. Period.
There may be a relationship between popularity and exploits in code (hackers targeting the biggest slice in the pie.) But this wasn't about exploits, it was about vulnerabilities.
More appropriately, there may be a relationship between the popularity of a codebase and the likelihood that any inherent vulnerabilities will be discovered. Whether this is good or bad for the users of the software depends entirely on whether any discovered vulnerabilities are fixed, or allowed to fester so that they can be exploited.
Just one?
How bout this one?
A vulnerability has been identified in a Microsoft ActiveX plugin called MCIWNDX.OCX, which possibly allows malicious HTML documents to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.
The problem is that a property called "Filename" isn't properly verified allowing malicious websites or HTML emails to cause a buffer overflow by supplying an overly long string. This could potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the system.
unpatched since: 2003-08-14
Granted, thats only a little more than 2 years...
hey...not important.
But there are oodles more at:
http://secunia.com/product/11/#advisories
God may be on your side, but Lady Luck is MY bitch
Note that only one of those is a 'critical' flaw, and that one is an ActiveX buffer overflow than can be avoided by just not using ActiveX. The rest are spoofing or system information flaws.
This author picked a date range that favored IE on the surface, and then quoted some pretty useless numbers which were skewed toward IE for the casual observer. Better numbers would be how many vulnerabilities REMAIN OPEN and HOW LONG they took to close from report date to fix date... I went to Secunia and pulled the following statistics In 2005 -- Firefox had 18 advisories posted. 1 remains unfixed, 1 remains partially fixed, 16 are fixed. -- IE 6.x had 11 advisories posted. 5 remain unfixed, 1 remains partially fixed, and 5 are fixed. Looking from 2003-2005 -- Firefox 1.x had 22 advisories posted (1 partial fix and 3 unfixed still) -- IE 6.x had 69 advisories posted (10 partial fix and 19 unfixed still) On Criticality of any advisory ever issued -- Firefox has had 0% extremely, 23% highly and 36% moderate -- IE has had 14% extremely, 29% highly and 20% moderate If you want tons more stats and graphs, go to... http://secunia.com/product/11/ (IE stats @ Secunia http://secunia.com/product/4227/ (Firefox stats @ Secunia)
... George Ou, on numerous occassions infuriates me and his editorials. I am not the Linux zealot that most Slashdot readers are (in fact I'm a .Net developer), but his articles and conclusions offend many educated readers.
He recently published a PGP vs. PKI article (I would link the article, but I am not giving him another web hit) where he was continually debunked by posters and PKI implementers because he stated that PKI was "too difficult". He couldn't grasp the concept that each job requires a different tool and one that fits the requirements best.
He constantly replies back on his blog through the Talkback feature ZDNet has (not that responding to user input is a bad thing) and does so with a level of arrogance that drips off the page. I refuse to even read his columns anymore and refuse to +1 his counters. Many users have already commented - there are too many reports acting as technical experts disseminating information that is misleading.
Hagrin.com
FF has problems, so does any software of any significant size. There's no need to be so defensive!
Firefox is definitely losing some momentum. Its growth rate seems to have stagnated, and it is starting to show some of the problems that have plagued other browsers. Namely, firefox is quite unstable with the latest official release (it takes up a lot of memory and slows down if you have multiple tabs open with somewhat sizeable (1MB) images. I think there is something wrong with the way it allocates and frees memory.) There is also some increase in vulnerabilities.
I think the real test will be to see what happens when the new version of Internet Explorer comes out in a few months. Is that going to steal back some of the lost market share or will firefox out-innovate it?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
ActiveX?
Read my blog.
Blackadder : Crisis Baldrick, Crisis! No marriage, no money, more bills! For the first time in my life I've decided to follow a suggestion of yours. Saddle Prince George's horse.
Baldrick : Oh sir, you're not going to become a highwayman, are you?
Blackadder : No I'm auditioning for the part of Arnold the bat in Sheridon's new comedy.
Baldrick : Oh that's alright then.
Blackadder : Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick : Yeah! It's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I have to disagree with you on this. I know a lot of people that have installed Firefox with the help or suggestion from me. When I come back to them months later and see the red arrow in the top right hand corner, I ask them "why haven't you installed your security updates". They always respond with "oh, I didn't know what that was up there so never clicked on it".
So I would say that many FF users are probably still on older versions based on my experience.
But the submitter is right. Though code security is important, the number of users is also a huge factor.
The coding standards and testing proceedures of the project/programmers matters also. I just switched from Netscape 7 to Moz 1.7.11 and found an annoying (non-security related) bug in Moz. Looked it up in Moz's bugzilla and found it had been a problem in 1.4, patches submitted, and it was marked "fixed." And yet, 3 versions later I've found exactly the same bug. Whatever testing proceedures Mozilla & Firefox are using look pretty weak and if they don't take regression testing more seriously, I predict that they will be hit again and again by the same bugs, some of which will be security issues.
The big advantage of Firefox is that it is not integrated with the OS in the same way that IE is. That alone is a big factor in reducing the number and severity of security bugs.
FreeSpeech.org
Has someone restated Godwin's law with DRM instead of nazis? If not I would like to call it "Jiushao's law" please.
I'm sorry, but that example does not count. The parent asked for an example of a flaw that has been unpatched for 6-8 months. This flaw has been unpatched for over 24 months. This is clearly outside the query specifications.
We do commend you for your efforts in identifying flaws in the software.
More exploits or not, FF causes fewer headaches. When it's all said and done, I'll choose FF's problems over IE's problems.
exactly. and really, at the end of the day it's not just number of the exploits, is it? maybe firefox has 44 exploits, all of which are easily implemented by a supreme diety who speaks assembler like a native speakers, and which, once done, make the browser a little slower or the graphics render funny.
whereas there may be only 6 exploits for IE, but my dog can (and does) routinely use them, and every single one of the roots the box the browser's running on.
this is clearly exagerated a bit, but the simple *number* of exploits isn't too relevent
Only ten?? Guess it depends on where Internet Explorer ends and where the "operating system" begins. Many of the worst bugs haven't "officially" been MSIE bugs, but the result is that a malicious web page can take control of your system or do other things you'd never imagine it ought to be able to.
I did a quick search of the microsoft bulletins and found 13. And these aren't even exactly the same ones Secunia lists (two of which they say Microsoft hasn't even fixed).
And why from March? Look at what an ugly month February was for MSIE.
MS05-038 - aug 17
JPEG Image Rendering Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1988
Web Folder Behaviors Cross-Domain Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1989
COM Object Instantiation Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1990
MS05-037 - jul 12
JView Profiler Vulnerability - CAN-2005-2087
MS05-032 - jun 14
Microsoft Agent Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1214
MS05-028 - jun 14
Web Client Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1207
MS05-026 - jun 14
HTML Help Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1208
MS05-025 - jun 14
PNG Image Rendering Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1211
XML Redirect Information Disclosure Vulnerability - CAN-2002-0648
MS05-024 - may 10
Web View Script Injection Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1191
MS05-020 - april 12
DHTML Object Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0553
URL Parsing Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0554
Content Advisor Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0555
MS05-015 - feb 8
Hyperlink Object Library Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0057
MS05-014 - feb 8
Drag-and-Drop Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0053
URL Decoding Zone Spoofing Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0054
DHTML Method Heap Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0055
Channel Definition Format (CDF) Cross Domain Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0056
MS05-013 - feb 8
DHTML Editing Component ActiveX Control Cross Domain Vulnerability - CAN-2004-1319
MS05-009 - feb 8
(PNG buffer overflow, may not affect IE, remote code execution in MSN, WMP, etc)
MS05-008 - feb 8
Drag-and-Drop Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0053 (yes, exploitable via web page)
MS05-006 - feb 8
Cross-site Scripting and Spoofing Vulnerability - CAN-2005-0049
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
You can't simply look at the numbers, imagine 2 vulnerabilities:
Browser A has a vulnerability, it opens access to a virus or spyware to enter your computer and get all your information while selling your children into slavery.
Browser B has a vulnerability that hides the true url you're looking at, but makes it look funky as hell.
Browser A get an update 6 months down the road that fixes this problem.
Browser B is fixed by an immediate change to the configuration, and an updated version is issued disabling that featureset. Then, shortly after, another new version is available, with that featureset back on.
These are hypothetical, IE doesn't really sell your children into slavery. =) And I doubt my FF history is correct. But what's worse? A problem where your car explodes when driving down the "wrong street" or your seatbelt being a little sticky? Both count as 1 problem, and thus looking at numbers becomes flawed.
Firefox finds the problems and tries to fix them asap, with 1.5 it has automatic updates and binary patching, hell yeah. IE has delayed some problems until IE7, period. FF is actively finding and fixing probs, IE fixes major ones and pushes others to the back of the line.
And that UI guy was right, Security doesn't interest non-programmers really. It's something to consider, especially in business/corporate enviroments, but "by the numbers" is really just asking to get yourself screwed.
As for IE7, I haven't seen any features promised that Firefox doesn't already have. And I think Firefox is still more standards-compliant, which is a pretty big deal to me. Also, Microsoft's general attitude toward their web services has been contrary to the spirit of common standards with multiple implementations, and has almost always been some kind of maneuver to force a lock-in. They thought they had that with IE 4.0, which explains why they didn't really take the broswer any further until maybe now.
This presents a kind of moral argument for using Firefox over IE. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, and it would be in any kind of sane universe. But we have Microsoft.
Right, I don't really buy this study either. I were just stating that if one says that Firefox is worse now one can't argue that people should switch. Also, sure, if people switch over in masses the development effort will go faster, but this was not really about what was best for Firefox, but what is best for the user now.
Best for the user right now is probably Opera - noone is willing to pay for a browser so there aren't really that many people willing to mess around with writing viruses and crap for it. As to whether Firefox or IE is better, well... Hard to say. I'd have to sift through exactly what the holes found in Firefox were, but last time I read up in any detail on the security holes found in an Open Source project, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all holes in tertiary stuff... Linux server software (and this is not necessarily true of Firefox, I'm really going way out on a limb here, and it will take backup from someone who keeps completely on top of this to really help me out... hint hint...) has bugs and problems and security patches, yes, but they're for a minor exploit that crashes or allows someone in through highly obscure software. Microsoft, since it's all one big piece, ends up handing you the keys to the castle. Therefore, one Microsoft bug can be seen as an unequivocal disaster and twenty Linux bugs can be seen as a biteme.
This is one that shows up over and over, that IE's basic design is flawed. Which is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. All the external interfaces and architecture seems clean and nice enough, and since I (and I would guess; you) have no way to look at the source I can't say that we have any reason to believe that the IE source is in a bad state.
This is where I do have proof. All those security patches for IE? Yeah, design flaw. It's not an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wrote effective, stable software. It's an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wanted to lock Netscape and friends out of the browser industry by making ActiveX mildly attractive and highly proprietary / dangerous to work in due to its features which were promised but under-tested. Or badly designed. Take your pick.
This is not a process-level permission thing (which would wreck the way the application works, you need to be able to save files, change settings and so on for it to be a sane desktop application). Rather Microsoft is finally getting around leveraging and extending the rather advanced and fine-grained NT security model for something. The basic idea is that most of the application runs with very restricted permissions and can launch subcomponents like a download or settings panel that have a higher level of permission. This is set on a very fine-grained level. There is no need to have separate components, nor is it all-or-nothing, a component can have access to specific system calls according with specific parameters, they may change only some given parts of the registry and so on.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
This I call bullshit,
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
I'm trying not to be biased here, but I obviously am very much so.
My little site.
What is it with people continuing to compare number of exploit fixes per month and whatnot to determine how secure something is? Surely we know by now that it's not a good idea. Didn't we just have an article a few days ago explaining the top 10 worst security practices? Anyway, this could mean that using firefox will net you lots of spyware or make it easier for someone to hack you. Or it could mean that the people working on firefox are better at finding and patching security holes (either because firefox has more of them or because it's coded better). In one article, we complain about bosses always being persuaded by hype, and in the next we overreact to the same hype. What hype-ocrisy.
Because it's about grace. It really is about grace.
ActiveX is not a big part of the bugs or of a poor design. It is just a misfeature. Microsoft could overnight throw out ActiveX and be in the same position as Firefox when it comes to those controls, as such it is not a fundamental design flaw. On the other side of the coin: ActiveX is a bad idea in practice. It is not due to Microsoft bugs or flawed design, it is just a fundamentally flawed idea since application developers deploy stupid things and users do stupid things. Microsoft has mae moves to improve the situation, demoting the ActiveX confirmation dialog to be a right-click option on the "popup"-bar in SP2 was a move in the right direction for instance.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
Sure it is something. But it is not used well in desktop applications (applications can all write to your home directory with your session startup scripts and so, wreck your data or whatever else they please). One could run them as dummy users that can't write to your home directory, but that'd make for an extremely confusing and inconvenient application. One could with some care and a whole lot of dummy users and setuid scripts copying things about in intelligent ways create the same kind of security model that Microsoft are doing for IE7. Problem is that it isn't a very good design and more importantly; no one appears to be doing it.
Even if possible it does not help if no one does it, and even if it gets done it will not be as nice as Microsofts framework that utilizes the much better security model provided by NT. Now, as I said, if it works out for Microsoft there will no doubt be some movement to get something going on Linux as well, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft is doing something interesting here.
Thats a true-er representation of security.
Mozilla usually patch flaws fairly quickly - there's flaws in IE that have been known for *years* before they were patched, if at all.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Best for the user right now is probably Opera - noone is willing to pay for a browser so there aren't really that many people willing to mess around with writing viruses and crap for it.
Opera is free as in beer btw. And it's the exactly the same browser as if you pay for it. Unless you think about the tiny Google ad bar at the top.
You only need to pay if you want the banner away and get official support by the company.
Nicolas Mendoza
Prepare for MSIE 7
I installed Firefox myself. Until I read your post, -I- didn't know about said red arrow. Of course, I periodically update it anyway, so it's not a big deal, and since I don't see what you're talking about, I assume I'm up-to-date enough, but....
Anyway, I sort-of like the "There is an update available. Would you like to install it?" dialog on launch that a lot of apps do. Just so long as it isn't broken like the one in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Running 1.5.0 and it says "A new version 1.50 is available," which turns out to be the same version.... (That's probably not the right version number, but you get the idea.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Nowhere near the (28% + 3% + 13%) = 44% for MSIE6, of course, but 24% is still pretty high.
Comparing Criticality, FF has 23% "Highly Critical" whilst IE has 14% Extremely Critical + 29% Highly Critical = 43%. That really is bad for IE.
Of course, numbers prove very little, and there's lots of room for reinterpreting these figures (availability of FF source can make vulns easier to find and exploits easier to write; huge IE install base increases likelihood of discovery and increased incentive to exploit, etc).
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Microsoft has the attitude of them against the world. They will conquer spam, hackers, or any flaws in the system. Founded in a belief that because they created windows and hold the code that it is their right to take on any malicious code themselves. The problem is that with such a god-complex stance they end up challenging every hacker to show them how they are so wrong. The introduction of Sp-2 was the solution? One flimsy firewall was all that was needed to keep the 'bad-men' at bay? Mozilla Firefox developers attitude is that security is important and that is a real pain in the ass for almost everyone involved. Firefox is an alternative to IE not as a solution to the problem, but because they offer tools to deal with the problem. Switching to firefox and doing nothing is not a solution to anything. Firefox offers meaningful tools to address security problems, but users still have to implement them. If one user is a paranoid freak that wants no porn, no spam, no interaction with the web he can structure firefox to be so prohibative through the many extensions that he can feel all safe in spite of not getting a very interactive web experience. Much harder to do in IE6. If another user is willing to trade web experience for security firefox allows for that too. After beta testing Deerpark Alpha it is apparent that the mozzila team is really stepping up the security options as well as making it easy to use them. Offering strong security options as a choice allows user to get what they want out of their browser. Ultimately, the answer to internet security is the same as the answer to any large social problem. Until society makes the rewards for negative behavior worthless the negative behavior will continue. If your house is full of goodies...it matters not how many locks you have. The solution is to make hacking worthless or at least less of a challenge
Relax, aren't you lucky that it is only my Opinion?
i've had firefox crash on me at least twice a DAY in the last year or so.
Here's what you can do:
1. Upgrade to Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 (at least). Do a custom install and check the box for the "Quality Feedback Agent" (Talkback crash reporter).
2. If Firefox ever crashes, let Talkback send the crash reports to the server.
3. If you continue seeing lots of crashes, send me some Talkback IDs and I'll try to determine whether it's a known problem and whether there is a workaround by searching Bugzilla or examining the stack trace.
The shareholder is always right.
Rather than simply counting vulnerabilities, take at look at the reports for Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Firefox 1.x shows 22 holes, 3 unpatched and rated 'less critical.' IE6 has 85 holes, 1/4 unpatched, and a 'highly critical' buffer overflow in ActiveX that's been open since 2003. Now, tell me, which one is more secure?
[Insert usual mantra of anyone being able to fix F/OSS but only MS being able to fix MSIE here] [Append snide remark about companies trying to hide rather than fix vulnerabilities here] [Insert random Zeeky Boogy Doog here]
I am a computer assistant at a very busy computer lab. In fact the most used lab at my university (a private university of over 40,000 students). Whenever blackboard or webapps act funny I direct people to firefox, and problems disappear. There may be security problems, but they get fixed, machines get re-imaged, and firewalls protect. But having a usable, working browser is priceless.
ActiveX is not a big part of the bugs or of a poor design. It is just a misfeature. Microsoft could overnight throw out ActiveX and be in the same position as Firefox when it comes to those controls, as such it is not a fundamental design flaw.
Actually, (for example) IE implements the XMLHTTPRequest (javascript) object as an ActiveX control. This is a favourite new toy for very spiffy interactive webpages (think AJAX). Examples of things that break if you turn ActiveX off: Gmail, google maps, google suggest.. etc.
This in turn causes users to not turn off ActiveX (the tin-foil-hat crowd would tell you this isn't a coincidence) because it would fundamentally break many really useful websites.
Reinard
So in other words, you've installed a little known, third party tool, to shield your browser from those dastardly Internets. This is not "good practice" - it should not, under any circumstances, be necessary to transparently doctor a program's input stream in order to keep said program happy. Not when said program is as frequently and widely used - indeed relied upon - as a web browser. If such a feature is genuinely useful in achieving robust security, then it can damn well be a feature of the core program, not something the user has to go above and beyond to utilise. IE is not made inherently more secure by using such tools; instead, you have simply introduced more developers into the arms race, who may or may not be more agile than MS when it comes to catching new exploits.
Congratulations - you've fitted your browser with a pair of rose-tinted glasses while it slept.
Seriously, doesn't this happen every couple months -- some idiot notices that active Open Source projects get more bug reports than Commercial projects, and suddenly the worlds on fire and the OSS model is unsound and the software is useless?
I'm not going to reiterate the truth of the matter, because if you don't know it by now, you are probably one of the few who don't WANT to know.
It's been a long time.
Note that only one of those is a 'critical' flaw, and that one is an ActiveX buffer overflow than can be avoided by just not using ActiveX. The rest are spoofing or system information flaws.
Actually, at least one other involves the possible exploitation of malicious code, although it requires active user input to do so.
But let's look at that one big famous doozie, the ActiveX exploit. That was reported in August 2003 - that's over two years ago!! It requires no user intervention if ActiveX is enabled, can do just about anything it wants to and it affects any MS ActiveX enabled product that can read HTML. The only solution is to turn off ActiveX, or to get it to prompt the user before it installs anything (which is not guarantee of safety). This is far, far worse than any exploit Firefox has ever had!
But even if it wasn't so potentially disasterous, don't you think MS would have been interested in fixing something that involves their pride-and-joy, ActiveX?? How could anyone ever look at such incompetence and claim that IE is more secure?!
I do some Web development and, while I'm not the ultimate Web Guru, some people actually pay me to do it. I don't follow security as closely as I should, perhaps, but this is about browser choice. And security is not the only factor to consider.
I have not invested in a subscription to MSDN. So, most of my references are either from books with strange animals on the covers or from the W3C recommendations.
I use my references and create a Web site for a client. Then I proceed to testing with Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and IE. What I have found is that, in Firefox, Mozilla, and (most of the time) Netscape, it usually all works just as expected. In Opera, a few changes are required. In IE, however, it almost never works like it should.
To be completely fair, I have to say that none of the popular browsers seem to get the W3C recommendations right 100% of the time (but that might be me getting it wrong :)). Sometimes (rarely), I must admit, it even seems like IE's interpretation of the W3C recommendation makes more sense. However, after using all of the browsers I test with, and a few others, I have to say that I choose Firefox.
Name ONE risky security flaw that has been known for 6 months without being patched by Microsoft.
The ability to boot MS Windows?
Fabio Aquotte
Not everyone uses HTML as an interface to the masses - DHTML has proven itself to be a compelling application front end.
DHTML is scripted manipulation of the HTML DOM. It needs no custom ActiveX controls. AJAX as I know it is just DHTML + XMLHttpRequest.
I've been developing exclusively with IE & HTML & Binary Behaviours (a form of activex) with AJAX style architecture for more than six years because it's just so easy to turn out great looking apps.
Where were these apps deployed? On the Internet or on intranets? Unlike Java applets, ActiveX controls do not run in a sandbox by default, and they have full access to everything the user can read and write. Given that most users on Windows XP Home Edition still run as a user with administrative privileges, this can be and has been exploited as a major security hole for, say, adding spyware to a machine.
Given that the IE DOM is written in COM (something that Mozilla tipped their hat to with XPCom after the terrible architecture in netscape) does it not make sense to use activeX controls within IE? (ActiveX controls are COM components).
But does Mozilla Firefox allow random web pages to run arbitrary XPCOM controls with the user's full access rights?
Please explain why MIME types on file extensions are a bad idea?
Problem is that in certain circumstances, the Internet Explorer suite will ignore the Content-type provided by the server in favor of guessing a Content-type based on the last few characters of the URL. Not only does this behavior violate the RFCs that govern the Web and Internet e-mail, but authors of malicious programs for Windows have managed to exploit this misbehavior.
I can't believe the most critical vulnerability inherent in IE has not been mentioned yet. What I am referring to is the fact that IE is a shell to the operating system
For the benefit of those who don't know what that means, opening up IE is effectively the equivalent of opening up a command prompt. Any command typed into IE will behave as if you typed it into a command prompt and will execute with whatever privileges you have. For most users, this will be Administrator. Another brilliant design choice.
Go ahead and type "c:\windows\system32\calc.exe" (or "c:\winnt\system32\calc.exe" depending on the name of your system directory) in IE and watch as Calc opens up. Try it with FF and you'll be prompted to save it--nothing more.
I don't know. You tell me. Which is the secure option and which is the security flaw so inexpressibly stupid it should be considered criminal negligence?
This isn't the sig you're looking for...