I’ve been recommending that friends and family use Firefox for web browsing for a while now, mainly because it doesn’t seem to suffer from the security problems that appear to plague Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). But while I’ve been aware of IE’s security issues enough to make the recommendation, I hadn’t seen a clear indication of how bad things were. That is until I read this post on the Washington Post’s Security Fix Blog yesterday.
The entire post is worth reading, but in short, Brian Krebs at the Washington Post reports that IE had known security issues for 284 days in 2006. That’s over 75% of last year! By comparison, Krebs reports that Firefox had just one nine day period (just over 2% of the year) during which the program had a known security flaw.
Ok, so 75% vs. 2%. That really puts things in perspective. To be fair to Microsoft, these flaws were in IE 6 and earlier versions and not the most recent version, IE 7, released in November and pushed out to everyone who has Windows XP. But still, how much faith would you put in a company with a product that was only secure 25% of last year? And it’s not a record Microsoft disputes according to Krebs, who writes that he shared the data with Microsoft and “the company raised no objections that would materially affect the results…” Makes you feel nice and secure, doesn’t it?
Look, if you use Microsoft Windows, IE is a fact of life because some things, like Windows Updates, require it. But that doesn’t mean you should use it for all your web browsing. So why not give Firefox a try? You can install and run it alongside IE without any problems. Firefox will even copy your bookmarks so you can continue to access all your favorite websites, making the switch as easy as possible. Heck, I’ll even give you the link:
