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Zero-Day Team Launches with Emergency IE Patch
Holy Mother of Thor writes to mention an eWeek article about a third-party patch for Internet Explorer. A dark horse security group formed after the WMF attacks in late 2005, the ZERT (Zero Day Emergency Response Team) has released a patch to attempt to slow the malware attacks on Windows. From the article: "'It is clear that we are dealing with an underground group of people who are writing exploits for profits. They are waiting for Patch Tuesday to pass, then it becomes Exploit Wednesday. We're seeing these zero-days in the wild, timed precisely to guarantee at least an entire month to spread,' Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK. Stewart, who is volunteering his reverse-engineering skills and time to ZERT in his private capacity, wrote an early version of the VML (Vector Markup Language) patch the group released Sept. 22 and worked closely with others to fine-tune the update to minimize potential glitches."
but it didn't have anything to do with DRM
Summation 2
There is no superior technology or anything that would help to make Firefox inherently more secure.
Uh, not quite.
MSIE was rewritten in the mid 1990s so that core modules became an integral part of the Windows OS. It is generally recognized that maintaining a wall between OS and app is good engineering, partly because it avoids many difficult security issues. This is especially true when the application is an interface to the outside world that by nature cannot be secured, like a browser. MS in its wisdom determined that the immediate courtroom benefits of knocking that wall down outweighed the security and maintenance concerns. This was a central part of their defense strategy against lawsuits brought by Netscape and others.
So yes, Firefox's implementation of the available technology is inherently more secure. Firefox preserves the wall between itself and the OS, and is not a superhighway into the core of the OS, the way today's MSIE is.