Firefox Users Surf Safer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Friday February 10, 2006 @09:29AM from the loose-browsers-sink-ships dept.

SenseOfHumor writes "According to two University of Washington Professors, Firefox users have a safer browsing experience than users of IE. These researchers sent their crawlers to 45,000 websites and studied the impact on Firefox and IE." From the article: "Levy and Gribble, along with graduate students Alexander Moshchuk and Tanya Bragin, set up IE in two configurations -- one where it behaved as if the user had given permission for all downloads, the other as if the user refused all download permission -- to track the number of successful spyware installations. During Levy's and Gribble's most recent crawl of October 2005, 1.6 percent of the domains infected the first IE configuration, the one mimicking a nave user blithely clicking 'Yes;' about a third as many domains (0.6 percent) did drive-by downloads by planting spyware even when the user rejected the installations."

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Re:How about a four-way matchup... by Spy+Hunter · 2006-02-10 10:43 · Score: 5, Informative

They used computers running Windows XP without Service Packs 1 or 2. They tested IE 6.0 (no details about any patch installs separate from the [lack of] service packs) against Firefox 1.0.6. This is all from their paper (warning pdf), which has numerous other details.
Somebody should start a news site that takes all the top news stories, finds the original research or primary source, and links to that instead of the dumbed-down yet sensationalistic news wire blurbs and blog whores. I know I'd appreciate it.

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