14 DAY TRIAL // Security is one of the core aspects of the dichotomy between Firefox and Internet Explorer. As a sum of best practices, healthy user behavior and code quality, Firefox comes on top of Internet Explorer in terms of security. Security company Secunia has made available a set of statistics indicating that Firefox users are more protected while surfing the web compared to Internet Explorer users. The reasons for this is simple: according to Secunia, Firefox users are more in tuned with the security updates delivered by Mozilla than IE users with the patches offered by Microsoft are.
"Since its release in December of last year, the free, online Secunia Software Inspector has conducted over 350,000 inspections. These inspections have identified 4.9 million popular applications, and out of those, 1.4 million applications were found to be lacking critical security patches from the vendors," revealed Secunia's Jakob Balle concluding that in excess of 28% of all applications scanned by the Software Inspector are vulnerable and exposed to attacks.
One of the reasons why the Mozilla open source browser is perceived as the most secure solution available is the users' "healthy behavior" in terms of security. Additionally, Mozilla's update infrastructure automatically delivers patches, and its users have no say in the matter. Microsoft's cumulative security updates for Internet Explorer are fed to users via the general Windows update mechanism. Windows users have the possibility to refuse the installation of IE updates, or of any patches for that matter, by disabling the service altogether.
"Comparing browsers and looking at Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, we found out that Firefox 2 is the least vulnerable, as only 5.19% of all Firefox 2 installations miss security updates, whereas 11.96% of all Opera 9.x installations miss security updates, and the numbers for IE6 and IE7 are 9.61% and 5.4% respectively. These numbers are not that alarming and show that users are fairly concerned about applying relevant updates for their browsers - which naturally is one of the most exposed applications," Balle added.