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Firefox 2.0 Wins Phishfight Against IE7
An anonymous reader writes "A new study that pitted the anti-phishing technology in Firefox 2.0 against that of IE7 generated some interesting results. From the Washingtonpost.com story: 'Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 locked 117 sites that Firefox did not.' Microsoft responded by pointing to its own supposed comparison study that put it in front of Mozilla and others in phish fighting, but the story notes: '3Sharp, the company that authored the Microsoft study, clearly state on their site that their goal in creating 3Sharp was "to use the robustness, flexibility, and sheer native capabilities of the Microsoft communication and collaboration technologies to enhance the business of our customers."'"
The risk of litigation inspired by false positives means they will always have to be a little more circumspect with who they classify as a phisher.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
As the article points out, false positives were not addressed at all in this study. Without testing for false positives, those numbers are useless. If Firefox listed 100% of websites as phishing sites, the fact that it caught more than IE7 isn't all that impressive.
I get spam all the time... but I too had never seen this thing before. Just because people get spam and phishing emails doesn't mean they're dumb enough to click them. I don't even do it out of curiosity.
No, you are dead wrong. Firefox gets patched more often, and since it is open source, that is the main reason that vulnerabilities are being found in it. Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof, while IE remains closed source and unavailable for third party code audits, which leaves it wide open to security breaches. Wouldn't you rather have a house that was built by one contractor and then inspected by thousands of others who were able to find and fix some issues with it than a house that was only inspected by the same contractor who built it? There is some correlation between popularity and number of exploits, but you make it sound like it's a 2-dimensional plane. It's not. There are other factors. The very same goes for Linux versus Windows. Until Windows and IE are open source, they will always be miles behind in security.
BTW, security through insignificance is the same as security through obscurity, which is just a false sense of security. Just because something is out of the limelight does not mean that no one has the intention of messing with it.
Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof
:) This will never happen with any software. The only way that would be possible is if you freeze the code, then ONLY fix bugs. Even then you have the possibility of creating a new bug from fixing a bug.
You must be new to software engineering
That's never going to happen tho. And the more features you add, the more bugs you add, regardless of open/closed source.
My problem is not that bugs exist, it's unavoidable, it's how they're handled that's important.