Jim Holden Blog

Firefox Security Updates

April 20th, 2006

The BBC is reporting that a large number of “security holes” in Firefox have been fixed and are now available in a new update.

This alone isn’t really any news or of much interest however the comment “Programs like Firefox have been thought to be more secure than other browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer” whilst true is also misleading.

The truth is that Microsoft is famous for releasing critical updates that appear to fix a problem but quietly solve numerous other issues in different areas. That Firefox has an open approach to listing ALL security problems is of benefit to us all. Hiding security issue fix after fix in a single unlabelled security update from MS means its impossible to actually compare the number of actual security issues that exist in MSIE.

I’m also interested in thier statement that some 80% of browsers are still MSIE. Whilst I believe that this is the case for the BBC site one wonders if this is actually a complete NET trend. Surely browser statistics are meaningless unless related to the type of meterial they were measured against. One would expect that a higher percentage of people who utilise The Register (for instance) would actually be using Firefox given the nature of the content. Sweeping general statements arn’t great and “if” 80% of the BBC’s users utilise IE then make it clear.

In other completely unrelated news:

Paul Thurrot produces without doubt his best and probably most caustic review of the awful Vista OS and subsequently trashes Microsoft in one blog post

After a well earned break Mini Microsoft is back blogging. Good stuff as usual.

Entry Filed under: Technology