Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image

Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2005-09-21

The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser successfully took market share away from software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer over the past 18 months, but has found that popularity comes with growing pains.

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Heck Miss the point why don't you. 2005-09-22
Anonymous (1 replies)

It not the number of faults found.

This is not a issue is out standing.

You would think with the number of bugs that have hit poor old firefox that it would have a lot of out standing.

IE still has a far higher out standing fault list.

Yes Firefox has had a few slip down into the list. ...

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Re: Heck Miss the point why don't you. 2005-09-23
Anonymous

actually I think it is you that is missing the point. try checking your web logs and see how many firefox users are even up to date with patches. firefox was advertised and pushed as the secure alternative giving people a false sense of security, it has a poor update mechanism that halk the time fai...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Matthew Murphy (3 replies)

Given Symantec's obsessive tendency to hit on the Firefox vs. IE subject, and yours in particular Mr. Lemos, we should really take a step back and examine the issue.

1) Difference in Vulnerability Reporting

Mozilla reports vulnerabilities that it fixes in its products. Period. Microsoft ofte...

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Re: Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
security interested

You rule man!

Security focus should take more care in this type of

article...

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Re: Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-29
Anonymous

Who do you think malicious code writer would concentrate more on: a software used by 7% users or one got more than 90% of users?

Don't try to compare the risk of information today to what 15 years or so ago. Just to look at how many people know how to use a PC today and how many before.

Buil...

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Re: Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-30
Anonymous

Creating a patch for a software that only is responsible for working or not-working of a few other programs (Firefox) is totally different from for a countless number of programs (IE).

Every vendor has released their software with bugs but only the big one got public attention. It is an open mark...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Ash

Yep, gotta agree that security probs usually come with popularity. I do believe Firefox is probably just as secure as Internet Explorer. Perfect software doesn't exist right now.

However, I'm still a Firefox user, because even with all these security issues I have not had any security problems (s...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Mark Grimes

"The less traveled road has less hazards... blah blah blah" -- Hypponen needs to take a look at the difference between Mac OS and Mac OS X architecture before making claims of malware in the 80's versus malware today. How many *BSD virii are there? Hmmm...

This article falls back to the same argu...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Cd-MaN

Ahem, it would be nice to include a disclosure (much in the sense the usual "SecuritFocus is owned by Symantec") that says: The Symantec Corporation didn't mention before browser vulnerabilities in their reports as a big threat before even though very serious ones existed in IE. How about that?...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
MC.Iglo

First of all: Symantec suxx!

They should care about their own software instead of writing such useless and faked reports!

Not the amount of disclosed bugs is important!

its the time until patch and the potential risk!

And as anybody can see here

http://secunia.com/product/11/

http://secuni...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Anonymous (1 replies)

It is so interesting to see that no one questions browsers from commercial software companies. Only open source browsers that are succesfull have to stand to questioning like this.

...

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Re: Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-23
Anonymous

what a joke, if there has been any software product that has been questioned more on security than IE I would like to know. MS, opera, netscape of the past have all beden taken to task over security. Now it is firefoxs turn and you hear nothing but "its not fari" from the zealots. Grow up, security ...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Paul Kosinski

I believe that Mozilla and Firefox are inherently less of a security risk than Internet Explorer for one very important reason: they are both pretty much stand-alone rather than being tightly integrated into Windows.

Internet Explorer is tightly bound to Windows in two ways (besides Microsoft's s...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-22
Anonymous

?Critics of the open-source Firefox browser took its security track record to task this week after a biannual Internet security report noted that the application had almost twice as many vulnerabilities as Internet Explorer in the first half of 2005, with a higher fraction of those flaws being sever...

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Mozilla's popularity... is because of tabbed browsing 2005-09-27
Anonymous

Using IE gives me fits now. So what if I have to upgrade FireFox once in a while. I get notified automagically and I'm done in 2 minutes. IE requires a reboot! Users want security, but it is a matter of perception.

PS Microsoft's solution in Windows 2003 is to effectively disable IE for all b...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-09-29
digitalrob

"If you run a Mac right now, you don't need antivirus," Hypponen said. "If you want to be safer, you should be using software that other people are not using."

Thats the stupidest comment ever. Since when have hackers been "ethical"? If I am going to hack and be malicious I am going to hit someth...

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Blackmail 2005-09-29
Radnice

Is it just me or should the open source community not have to pay 'bug bountys'? Ferris is just a crook who tries to blackmail software makers into paying up huge chunks of cash or he'll leak his findings. The fact that he leaked data to provide a means of exploit is equivalent to writing the expl...

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If the source is oper => more vulnerabilities can be found 2005-10-01
Anonymous

Read only the title!...

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Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image 2005-10-08
Anonymous

As a system admin- since I switched our users over to Firefox the number of problems with adware and spyware has greatly diminished. We were spending 15% of our resources on cleaning up computers every week. Since our users switched to firefox that has dropped to pretty much zero.

In fact since...

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