Firefox

I'm sure some of you read Jon's blog. He recently posted an article on Firefox (that got 15 comments at time of posting this - wow!) and I would like to state my opinion on it.

First off, I respect Jon's opinion, and he does have a good point. With that said...

According to Symantec:

The Mozilla family of browsers had the highest number of vulnerabilities during the first six months of 2005 with 25; 18 of these — 72% — were rated as high-severity. Microsoft Internet Explorer had 13 vendor confirmed vulnerabilities of which eight — 62% — were considered high-severity.

But I have a problem with this statement. While Firefox has more discovered bugs, notice that IE only has "vendor confirmed" bugs. Firefox is open source, so anyone can see the source code and tell wether there really is a bug or not. How do we know that Microsoft is hiding how many bugs there really are? There are probably tons and tons of bugs in IE, but since it is closed source, we'll never know.

But, let's face it - Firefox still has bugs. However, I really have no problem using it under Linux. Chances are that several of those bugs use an exploit to make Firefox download and run a virus. What kind of virus? A Windows virus, duh. What's gonna happen when it tries executing a Windows virus on Linux? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. (before you jump on me about Wine, I have heard that almost no Windows virus has ran successfully using Wine)

I'll admit, I didn't look at any of the bugs to see what they were, but I imagine there are a few that do affect Linux machines. Time to use Konqueror again? Maybe, maybe.

Tech Tags: linux mozilla firefox mozilla firefox konqueror windows virus