Microsoft published a report that evaluates the security performance of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox through a detailed comparative look at vulnerabilities. The so called “Web Browser Vulnerability Analysis”report finds that, over a period of three years, Internet Explorer proved to have fewer vulnerabilities than Mozilla Firefox.
The finding shows that:
* Microsoft has fixed 87 total vulnerabilities (across all supported versions of Internet Explorer) while Mozilla has fixed 199 vulnerabilities in supported Firefox products
* Internet Explorer experienced a lower volume of reported vulnerabilities across all categories of severity (high, medium, low)
The IE blog also wrote that:
* According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation, there are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly.
* Perhaps more important than the overall numbers is the positive impact IE7 has made for our users. As you know, we focused a lot on improving security in IE7. We believe IE 7 is the safest Microsoft browser released to date. According to a vulnerability report published today, IE7 has fewer vulnerabilities than previous versions of IE over the same time period. The report showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.
You should really read the comments that followed that IE blog post and judge for yourself. Personally, I have nothing good to say about IE. Yeah, 300 million users, so what? As long as th browser doesn’t fully implement the w3C recommendations and css standards (yeah, there are more to list here, again, read the comments in that post), it’s just a lousy browser with many users.
Perhaps the best comment that I read was this:
Can someone let me know what IE is?
That really cracked me. I wonder whether it’s really a question or a sarcastic comment. It really made a good laugh.
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