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:Or 100% if its a new installation...

[HairyCanary]

Mod parent down. The vast, vast majority of Windows XP users are clueless. None of these things suggested come naturally to them. I can't fathom what would happen if I asked my mother to keep a CD of security patches handy, enable the software firewall, don't connect the cable until she's protected, etc... She can install the OS if need be, but that's about it.

The real solution -- Microsoft should be sending free updates to all registered XP owners with updated CD's that contain pre-patched installations.