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Internet Explorer more secure than Firefox in Microsoft study

According to Microsoft, Internet Explorer is more secure than Firefox – but critics say that the study was flawed.

Firefox was a surprise success – just when we thought that the browser wars were over, Firefox comes along and takes almost 10% of browser share in less than a year. A lot of the drive to Firefox was the desire to use a more secure browser, and, after all, Microsoft had parked development on Internet Explorer.

The comparison rests around the number of critical vulnerabilities fixed over the last year – Mozilla supplied 56 fixes while Microsoft supplied only 17.

However, Microsoft tends to ‘bundle’ its fixes, so that ‘17’ may well represent a larger number – and it doesn’t take into account items not fixed.

Well, this is all tit-for-tat stuff, but it’s healthy in one way: when Microsoft parked development of Internet Explorer, it was bad for security, bad for the user (because there was no/little advance in browser functionality) – and terrible for competition.

There’s no need to take sides in the browser wars, but we can all agree that we’ve now got access to better browsers – all of which offer more features and all of which are more secure than they were.