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Mozilla Says IE 7 Won't Beat Firefox Security
Jason Lee Miller
Staff Writer
2006-06-05
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One of the chief selling points (if a free browser can have a selling point) of Mozilla Corporation's Firefox browser has been its reputation of being more secure than Internet Explorer. Preaching to a choir of open-sourcers at the Red Hat Summit, the company said it expects to maintain that advantage.
Firefox has won the hearts of between 10-20 percent of the web browser market, stealing away a large chunk of Microsoft's IE monopoly. According to Secunia, those converts are well deserved. The security firm reports that while IE 6 still has 21 unpatched vulnerabilities, Firefox only has three.
Critics have asserted that Firefox' apparent security advantage has been due to it lower market share, as hackers and malicious coders maximize effectiveness by targeting the browser used by at least 80% of the web surfing world. But Mozilla Corporation board member, Christopher Blizzard, believes the open source browser will always be ahead of IE, even as Microsoft gears up to release a more secure IE 7 with many Firefox-esque features.
"In the long run, [Firefox] will always be more secure [than Internet Explorer] because we have transparency and we have external contributors," said Blizzard.
Blizzard admits that Firefox is not bug-free, but thinks that Mozilla has a lot of inherent advantages by having contributors from outside the company addressing security issues and flaws. The company offers a $500 reward to coders if they can find security flaws in the browser (and don't exploit them in the process).
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About the Author:
Jason is a graduate of the University of Kentucky. He covers business, technology, and security issues.
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