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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

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

"ActiveX remains the browser

"ActiveX remains the browser plug-in or add-on with the most number of vulnerabilities. It had a whopping 366 vulnerabilities..."

So ActiveX had 366 vulnerabilities... ActiveX, the plug-in that is ONLY available to IE, and is installed/active in darn near every windows machine using IE... ActiveX, which is required for people to do Windows Updates in XP... (Not the automatic ones, I know.)...

I think separating those 366 vulnerabilities is rather underhanded, since they CAN'T affect ANY other browser, and DO affect MOST IE users. So in effect (using your "silly metric"), your report should have been titled "Report: I.E. is the world's most vulnerable browser (it has 3x the vulnerabilities!)"... but then, that wouldn't have surprised anyone.

You simply took some numbers from a report and repeated them without adding any value or thinking about them yourself. That's called a "poor summary", not journalism.

I would like to hear your report on how logging is the safest job in the world. After all, being employed as a logger isn't dangerous -- it's all the falling trees and chainsaws...