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Story: The browser wars are back, according to Netscape's founder

Posted by: shane (Sunday 10 October 2004, 8:43 AM)

"IE is the most attacked browser because it is the most commonly used and it is patched regularly which is all you can ask."

IE is attacked most because it is so deeply embedded into Windows that it is the easiest way to own a Windows box. Also, features such as ActiveX are just asking for trouble.

What we should be asking of MS is to put IE in a proper sandbox and not have it be so deeply entwined into Windows that it is virtually impossible to use it without all sort sof rubbish ending up on your PC. Patches do not fix the fundamental bad design. That design only came about as a means of shutting out every other browser. They certainly didn't do it for your good and it hasn't done Windows any favours at all in terms of security.

"I believe firefox has had a significant number of fixes and patches and security updates since release and probably more proportionately to IE."

IE fixes tend to be bundled. Each time there is a patch it covers a whole bunch of vulnerabilities. They also have a policy of not announcing flaws until after they are patched and many flaws go unpatched for years and cause significant problems. The Mozilla Firefox developers have put out patches, lots of them, but they are generally done before they have ever been abused and they don't wait until they have a few dozen to roll into a patch, they'll fix it as soon as possible. Some of these patches only exist on Windows too because the Mozilla developers find flaws in the underlying OS that they have to deal with (the shell:// flaw for example).

I find it extremely encouraging that updates to Firefox happen at the pace they do. Certainly when I use Windows I only run Firefox. My wife's grandmother was having a nightmare with her machine and was always asking for help until I hid IE and Outlook Express and replaced them with Firefox and Thunderbird. Since then the system simply works and all the spyware her machine will filled with has also been removed and futher infections are blocked by search & destroy too. Windows can be made a pretty secure OS by modern standards, even pre XP versions, but you must make sure you don't use IE, especially now that MS is refusing to incorporate the XP2 updates into any previous versions of Windows. The popup blocking in Firefox works well, and the adblock extension makes web browsing much more pleasant. All these people who say IE is just fine for them really should take a look at Firefox with adblock installed. You may still have to use IE for some sites, there is even a Firefox extension that allows you to open the same page in IE if it doesn't render properly, but the vast majority of the web these days works perfectly in firefox and many times better than in IE (CSS and PNG being the major reasons).

Oh, for the record I have Windows, Linux and Mac systems and I run Firefox on all of them. While Safari is OK, it isn't as good as Firefox although it is a fairy close call. On the other platforms there is simply no competition, Firefox wins hands down.