Remember when you downloaded Firefox circa 2004 because Internet Explorer was inundating Windows XP with viruses? Those days have long since passed and according to a Google-funded study carried out by Accuvant, Firefox is now among the least secure web browsers. Naturally, Chrome is the best.
Obviously this has to be approached with a fair amount of skepticism, Forbes points to Accuvant’s industry cred for objective reports on security. This particular report calls out Firefox’s inability to sandbox code in the browser, thus preventing hackers and malicious code from gaining access to the rest of someone’s operating system.
Accuvant’s researchers argue that Google’s ability to start from scratch in creating Chrome allowed the company to incorporate new security features that were tougher to integrate into Firefox’s legacy code base. “Mozilla’s products were around before browser security was such a relevant issue,” says Accuvant researcher Chris Valasek. “Chrome was just born at the correct time in the correct environment.”
Internet Explorer, which has been bashed for years as being a security cesspool was actually found to compete quite well against Chrome as far as security goes, though it wasn’t found to be better. Also curious about this report: where’s Safari and Opera? [Forbes]
Rob C
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 10:01 AMYeah, I dumped firefox a while back. Started getting buggy and annoying.
Since been using comodo dragon, which is based on chrome.
So much better.
Titsnass
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 12:26 PMRubbish, I’ve been using FF since it started and MSE seems to be quite capable of clearing the path of nasties. Haven’t had an infection (that wasn’t caused by my own stupidity that is) for years. I’ll stick with it for now, at least until Chrome can build a decent print page/print preview, the current one is complete crap!
MotorMouth
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 1:07 PMSecurity is not an issue if no-one is targeting you. Whilst Firefox is a relative bit player, these issues hardly matter. I’d also suggest that even the least secure browser today is probably 100 times more secure than anything was in 2004, which means it is even less relevant. Finally, something lie 80% of malware relies on tricking the user into running it, so browser security is not even relevant to the hackers any more.
Inform
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 9:21 PMOh please! This is Googles way of eliminating the competition by turning them on each other.
So over the propaganda that companies produce as if its an epiphany to all end-users. Time testing and consumer following is a good indication as to weather a browser is dong it job!
If in the last 5 years people havent discovered “firefox is less secure that IE” for themselves – than frankly this article can be stamped as bogas. If Firefox wasnt up to standard it would have died out way before v.2 in 2006.
Google get back to playing catchup with “social networking”!
chris
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 10:45 PMFirefox for life! Love it, and always will
sagaashan
Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 1:35 AMi am very entresting about so make me to downlooad
Nathan
Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 2:40 AMIts bull, as you have a good security program on your pc, there is no worry, Firefox has been the only browser I use for many years, I’ll even download it onto a pc that don’t have it just so I can use it. Firefox is the only way to go. F@#k you google
Drew
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:27 AMIE and Firefox both take ages to launch and have a cluttered UI.
Chrome is fast and has a clean layout.
Michael
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 10:15 AMIE fo life!
RobbyM
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 10:38 AMAt least Gizmodo mentioned that the study was funded by Google – mainstream media now seems to just report studies as fact and ignore who funded it..
Steve P
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 11:11 AMI tried Chrome last week and it took just 1 day to get me hopping mad and delete it forever from the hard drive. It is CRAP!