Browser Wars, Round N

ComputerWeekly says:

There have now been more flaws in the Firefox browser this year than in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

I think this needs considerable qualifying:

The Firefox team have fixed more things than the MSIE team this year;

MSIE has over six times as many outstanding (unfixed) bugs as Firefox;

MSIE’s many outstanding flaws are rated “Highly critical”, FF’s few are rated “Less critical”;

Working wild exploits for FF: zero; for MSIE: hundreds;

Because MSIE is closed-source, only a very few people can audit it, but anybody can audit FF;

This cannot be written off to popularity, since MSIE’s exposure far outweighs the popularity ratio.

For some interesting if somewhat unnerving statistics, see here:

http://nanobox.chipx86.com/ie_is_dangerous.php

For the record, I use the Konqueror web browser.

Comments

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