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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."

3 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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    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?