Firefox Users Surf Safer

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."

Comments

Re:What are those 0.6% evil sites doing?

[frankie]

Whoops, should have RTFAed. They intentionally used unpatched browser versions to maximize infections. That's really sucktacular of them. They should have at least included a fully updated XP SP2 IE in its default "secured by Microsoft" state, as an experimental control.