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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Monday, December 26, 2005

Internet Explorer Sucks

Schneier on Security:

This study is from August, but I missed it. The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available.

MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole.

Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe.

Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little better than it should be, as two of the upatched periods happened to overlap.

Thanks Felipe.

Update: It's worth noting that I've run this test in both Firefox 1.5 and IE 6.0 in XP SP2, and got the following results with both browsers:

High Risk Vulnerabilities 0
Medium Risk Vulnerabilities 0
Low Risk Vulnerabilities 0

[ Posted at 12:47 PM | Permalink ]