Is Firefox Really More Secure Than Internet Explorer? Guess not...

IT World Canada recently published an interesting article entitled "5 Technology Security Myths, Busted".  You can read the article at: http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/5-technology-security-myths-busted/140601

Mozilla's Firefox browser has the reputation - especially among "techies" - as being a very secure way browsing the Internet.  Most of these techie types are very fond of looking down their noses at Microsoft's Internet Explorer because of it's security exploits, in particular.  I've always assumed they were correct and it made me feel a little guilty at not having switched to Firefox but this article gives me reason to feel better about being an IE user almost exclusively. 

In part, the article says:

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer gets a lot of bad press, and you might think it's got more security holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese. Not exactly.

According to a recent report by Symantec, Mozilla Firefox had the most new vulnerabilities in 2009, with 169, while Internet Explorer had just 45. However, Internet Explorer was still the most attacked browser for the reason we mentioned earlier: Hackers, like advertisers, go for market share, and despite big gains by Firefox, IE is still number one.

Looking at browsers with a smaller market share, Symantec found that Safari (remember what we said Apple products being vulnerable?) had 94 new vulnerabilities, Opera had 25, and Chrome 41. All of the browsers had an average window of exposure--the time between when exploit code affecting vulnerability is made public and when it is patched--of less than 1 day, on average, except for Chrome (2 days) and Safari (13 days), according to the report."

So, if you're like me and just prefer IE... don't feel bad about it.   That's not to say that we shouldn't always be vigilant because we should.   IE is still a large target for hackers and, in the same article above, they make the point that 20,000 new exploits (i.e. viruses, etc) are discovered every day.   That's scary.