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Preston Gralla's picture
Preston Gralla

Seeing Through Windows

Report: Firefox is the world's most vulnerable browser

Firefox fans take note: A just-released report from the security company Secunia found that Firefox is far more vulnerable than Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer --- and by a wide margin. In 2008, it had nearly four times as many vulnerabilities as each of those browsers.

The report, available here in PDF form, found that Firefox had 115 vulnerabilities reported in 2008, compared to 30 for Opera, 31 for Internet Explorer, and 32 for Safari.

That doesn't mean, though, that Internet Explorer is off the hook for security concerns. Far from it. ActiveX remains the browser plug-in or add-on with the most number of vulnerabilites. It had a whopping 366 vulnerabilities, compared to 54 for Java, 30 for QuickTime, 19 for Flash, and one for a Firefox extension. No Opera widgets had any vulnerabilities.

Internet Explorer also has a much longer lag time between when a vulnerability is found, and when a patch is issued for it, again by a wide margin. The lag for Internet Explorer was between 78 days and more than 294 days (some vulnerabilities weren't patched by year's end). For Firefox, the lag ranged between 15 and 86 days. Secunia didn't compare how long Safari and Opera took to patch.

What People Are Saying

Is this journalism?

Are you a journalist? You must think you are...

You did state the fact of this report existing. Why don't you now comment on how true it is?

Google or Yahoo it and see what the problems with it are. Your article is misleading in its insinuation (that Firefox is less secure than IE) and I think you need to rectify this.

Otherwise, dear sir, you are not a journalist. Your move.

Funny...

...how everyone freaks out about a useless report. It came out in 2008, and is testing using Firefox 2.0, unpatched. FF is on 3.5.5 now and I bet you each of those old vulnerabilities are squared away.

LOL @ Firefox

Firefox = Internet Explorer Shell

Browser Security Report

Read the report B4 you start with all the trash talking folks. It wasn't written by CW. Don't be so hasty to kill the messenger. If you don't want to believe the report then don't. In fact, maybe you should get jobs with Secunia since you obviously know so much more about browser seciruty than the experts. Then maybe you could fix the problem, yeah that's the ticket.

Preston you're worthless

Man, you are sush a noob go find some other job more fit for you instead of posting your misleading crap.

People aren't so stupid you know. You are a disgrace.

Any software can leave you exposed, but

Any software can leave you exposed, but how long you are exposed, does matter.

The last paragraph in the article confirms that the headlines is either a distortion or a flat out lie!

Fewer than I thought

The vulnerability list is just a count of how many times someone reports an issue with a browser - sort of like a barometer of how loud the community is when it finds a problem. The actual number of true issues found is shown by examining the number of advisories issued. After all the vulnerabilities are examined, the false ones are removed, and this is what is left.

For 2008:
Firefox 1.x : 0
Firefox 2.0.x : 10
Firefox 3.x : 8

I.E. 5.0.1 : 9
I.E. 5.5 : 0
I.E. 6.x : 13
I.E. 7.x : 11

Totals:
Firefox: 18
IE: 33

I guess anyone can say they

I guess anyone can say they are a security company and submit a report and people believe what they read?

115 > 366 ?

This must be New Math.... otherwise how is 115 a bigger number than 366? You're starting to sound like Owe Bama.

-rm

You must mean "Bush"-enomics

You must mean "Bush"-enomics