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Firefox Users Surf Safer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

6 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by Arthur+B. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everyone knows that... I mean if a user has an idea what spywares are and heard of firefox he probably uses it, if not this study won't change anything.

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    \u262D = \u5350
    1. Re:Who cares? by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've used firefox since it was called phoenix, and beta versions of mozilla before that... I'd never heard of spyware until quite recently, i also didn't really understand the concept of popups and other intrusive stuff...
      I went from amigaos (fast browsers with no javascript) to unix with mozilla (and popup blocking by default) and never encountered things like popups and spyware, i had a rose tinted view of the internet...

      Then i went to a friend's place, and saw him battling with IE... i was absoloutely disturbed, how could anyone's experience of the web be so horrendous, and yet he was still willing to use it!
      Had i first experienced the internet in that way, i'd not have had much interest in it at all.

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  2. Firefox more successful than Linux? by IAAP · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Of all the FOSS projects out there, it looks as if Firefox is the most successful in terms of market penetration. People who never have heard of Linux/GNU know about Firefox.

    Could it mean the death of IE?

    1. Re:Firefox more successful than Linux? by pluggo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As far as desktop penetration, I'd have to concur. But Apache has eaten IIS for breakfast in the server market.

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      Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
  3. Re:Or 100% if its a new installation... by setagllib · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Speaking of being clueless, ICMP and UDP are connectionless. TCP is the only one of the three protocols you mentioned which *does* maintain a bidirectional state on the protocol layer. So while it's nice that you think you've got it all worked out by using the pitiful filtering capacity you get out of the box... you still fail at the internet.

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    Sam ty sig.
  4. Ditto for Win2K by Digz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In a move of utter brilliance, I forgot to unplug the network cable when doing a Win2K reinstall one time (and the network cable was hooked to DSL).

    Before it was done installing I'd been rooted and someone had already started making ISO'd warez available.

    Needless to say, I don't forget that part anymore (hey, it was 3 AM or something). ;)

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    SYS 64738