Firefox 21 times safer than IE?

The ability of PCs to use Internet Explorer browser to be infected with spyware when surfing the web is 21 times more than the systems running Mozilla's open source Firefox browser.

This is the conclusion of a researcher at the University of Washington - a university that received support from Microsoft - in a report of recent research findings.

' We can't say whether Firefox is a secure browser ,' Henry Levy, one of two University of Washington professors, created two crawlers (crawler). Searching for online spyware in 2005 - has confirmed so. ' But we can absolutely say that users will be safer when surfing the web with Firefox .'

' But we can't say IE is less secure, ' Levy explained, ' because we opted to use unpatched browser versions. We are just trying to understand the number of threats so we use unpatched versions to be able to detect more malicious software . '

In May and October 2005, Levy and his colleague Steven Gribble sent their beetles to 45,000 websites to search, sort executable files as well as test the effectiveness of standalone websites. Damage contains software that can automatically download and install with unpatched versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Levy and Gribble, along with others involved in the study, set up IE with two different configurations - one configured according to the type of user that allows all downloads and one to not allow it. Which download request period - aims to track the number of successful spyware attacks on the system.

The results of the October 2005 survey showed that only 1.6% of the websites mentioned above successfully broke into IE with the first configuration. Meanwhile, only 0.6% succeeded in installing spyware on the system even though the user refused all download requests. ' These are not too big numbers,' Gribble asserts, 'but it will be a big number if we consider the number of websites available on the Internet. '

With the same configuration, only 0.9% of dangerous websites successfully attacked Firefox. No website has succeeded in attacking Firefox with software that automatically installs downloads.

So if you compare IE and Firefox with similar configurations, it is 21 times more likely to get infected with spyware than Firefox.

Most malware exploits security holes in IE to hack users' systems using ActiveX or JavaScript, Gribble said. These are the two technologies that give IE the most security holes. Meanwhile, Firefox does not support ActiveX, so the browser seems to be more secure than malware than IE. Because of this, most malware attacks Firefox mainly by Java apple.

One of the most surprising conclusions from the two researchers' report is that there is one spyware out of every 20 files available online, one in every 25 sites. page containing spyware.