"I am safer browsing in Mozilla’s Firefox browser than I am in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I firmly believe this to be the case. Yes, that’s right, Firefox is safer than IE."
This is how author kenneth van Wyk breaks open his article on the never ending browser security competition IE vs. Firefox : Which is safer ?.
The author establishes a few evaluation criteria which will be applied to both products:
Lower profile target At first glance, this might seem an odd criteria to chose a day-to-day software product like a browser. As odd as it may seem, the author thinks that the fewer that are using the prodict , the better. Less (userbase) is more (security) . IE gets an F while Firefox gets a B+.
Configurability The fact that IE is more configurable when it comes to security (the use of Zones, the ActiveX, Flash controls) makes it more attractive for the security minded user.
The bad news in all of these rich features is that a) by default, far too much untrustworthy content is allowed (e.g., JavaScript) and that b) the sheer vastness of the features will scare most users out of doing any substantive fine-tuning to protect themselves. Nevertheless, IE gets a B+ while Firefox gets a B-.
Security-minded plugins The large abundance of Mozilla Firefox security plugins turn the odds in favor of the most popular open source browser. The author is specifically excited about the NoScript extension which gives the user full control over the JavaScript code. Even if there might be similar plugins for Microsoft IE, it gets a D while Firefox gets an A-.
Open Source Scrutiny The simple fact that the Firefox source code is "out there" means that hackers and crackers have allready got the chance to find bugs which have been fixed by the community. More exposure means more attention from all sort of developers and this is good. By being a close source product, IE gets an F while Firefox gets a C+.
