Symantec's report on online security concluded that Internet Explorer is safer than Firefox.

Obviously, Mozilla responded to this and said that the security company's report considered only the vulnerabilities acknowledged by the producer.

Mozilla uses Secunia's report for 2003 - 2005 to back its statement that Firefox is safer than IE. This report says that 22 security advisors were issued for Firefox, while Internet Explorer got 85.

Based on these, Secunia rated Firefox as "less critical", while Internet Explorer was rated as "highly critical"

Tristan Nitot, Mozilla Europe's president, also said that the open-source foundation released security patches at a much faster rate than Microsoft. Symantec's report didn't take this into account.

This is not the first time when Symantec's security report comes to weird conclusions. In March, Symantec said that Mac OS X was not such a safe system after all.

Symantec restates this idea in the current report, warning Mac users that they are living "fake sense of security" and that despite the constant number of vulnerabilities over the last six months, the hacker might still prepare attacks.