Spyware Barely Touches Firefox

Is your computer behaving weirdly? Do ad windows pop up at random times for no reason? Has your internet connection noticeably slowed for no discernable reason? Do weird and horrible things sometimes happen? Crashes? Freezes? Worse?

What browser do you use? Internet Explorer or something else?

Yahoo News reports that researchers recently set up four computer systems, two with Internet Explorer, two with Mozilla Firefox. One of each kind was set to behave like a naive user who presses "Yes" whenever asked a question about downloading and installing software. One of each was set to behave like a paranoid user who said no to everything. Then all four systems were sent off to visit 45,000 websites.

The results show the percentage of sites that successfully infected the system:

	User Simulation
Browser	Naive	Paranoid
Internet Explorer	1.6	0.6
Mozilla Firefox	0.09	0.0

As the researchers say this doesn't conclusively prove that Firefox is a safer browser, just that in practice there are less sites that will infect a system running Firefox. It could be that if Firefox got more popular there would be as many or more sites that successfully infected Firefox. Possibly.

For now, if you want to use your computer free of virii, adware, malware and all kinds of hassles and instabilities use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. These days there is even a free extension for Firefox that will let you open pages that don't play nice with Firefox within a tab in Firefox but using IE to render the page. For those few occasions where the website is happy to blow off 10-20% of the web.

[UPDATE]
The Washington Post has a related article today, 'Security Fixes Come Faster With Mozilla'. The Post found that in 2005 Mozilla averaged 21 days between being told of a security flaw and issuing a fix and 16 when the flaw was critical, while Microsoft averaged 135 days.

In terms of user exposure the stats came out like this:

	Users Exposed to a Threat (days in 2005)
Browser	Active Virus	Potential Exploit
Internet Explorer	38	256
Mozilla Firefox	0	17

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