Microsoft: Firefox is twice as dangerous as IE

Mozilla's Firefox browser is much more dangerous than Internet Explorer, Microsoft said in a report, "Internet Explorer and Firefox Vulnerability Analysis."
The author of the report, Jeff Jones , director of security strategy for Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, compares the number and severity of vulnerabilities in both browsers since Firefox was released in November 2004. For three years, 87 versions of IE were fixed in various versions of IE and 199 in Firefox. If we compare vulnerabilities by degree of danger (“high”, “low”, “medium”), then Firefox leads in number in all categories.

The report caused a backlash among Mozilla supporters. Mozilla’s chief ideologue, Mike Schever, called Microsoft’s study untenable, lazy, and even "malicious."
“If in America, teeth are treated more often than in Africa, this does not mean that our teeth are worse,” said Mr. Shaver in an interview with eWeek.com. Microsoft, in his opinion, made a conclusion with exactly the opposite: if more vulnerabilities are fixed, the browser is, accordingly, safer, he argues. Moreover, Microsoft did not take into account its undocumented patches and patches included in the Service Pack. Finally, a single Microsoft security bulletin may contain several patches, and the report does not indicate whether this detail has been taken into account. “In order to look better than Microsoft,” Mr. Schever wrote in his blog, “you need to stop fixing and making public the vulnerabilities found by the developers themselves.”
This is Jeff Jones' second talk showing the benefits of Microsoft security. In June, Mr. Jones published a material comparing the security of Windows Vista, Linux and Mac OS X. According to the report, Microsoft’s new operating system is much more reliable because the number of vulnerabilities discovered during the first six months of Vista’s existence is much lower than the first half a year in various versions of Linux and Mac OS X.
Based on Cnews