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Mozilla Firefox--most vulnerable Web browser

Nov 10, 2009 18:17

What is the most vulnerable browser today? If your answer is the Internet Explorer, then you're wrong. According to applications security vendor Cenzic, the most vulnerable browser today is Mozilla's Firefox accounting for 44 percent.

Apple's Safari is at second with 35 percent, Microsoft's Internet Explorer at third with 15 percent, and in fourth place is Opera with 6 percent.

Cenzic attributes the Firefox result to the site's plug-in architecture, while Safari's vulnerabilities are due mostly to vulnerabilities reported on the Safari iPhone browser.

Compared with Cenzic's Q3/Q4 2008 report, IE accounted for 43 percent of all reported Web browser vulnerabilities, while Firefox came in close at 39 percent.

In my own opinion, the result is both good news and bad news for Mozilla. The good news is that increasingly more people are using Firefox, as the browser continues to eat up market share from IE, although IE is still the more widely used browser to date. The bad news is that as there are more Firefox users, hackers will now exploit whatever vulnerabilities the browser has--which is the same situation as IE before.

The challenge now for Mozilla is to do whatever it can to secure Firefox. The company recently introduce a plug-in checker service and the release of a Firefox 3.0.9 update to address several vulnerabilities.

The Cenzic report does not make any distinction between corrected security vulnerabilities and those that have have been exploited. Cenzic added that although Firefox has the most number of vulnerabilities reported, it does not mean it's the least secure browser. Same with Opera. The report does not mean that Opera is the most secure as well.

I wonder where Google Chrome's position is among its peers.

God bless us all!

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