German government advises against using IE

[NormanH]

Here

[andyh4]

Norman

 

The story is a week old and at the bottom and related stories is the one about Microsoft fixing the problem.

[Quillan]

The thing is that it is not just IE that suffers from these security attacks. The bigger the market share a browser has the more people try to attack it. Because IE is the more common amongst corporate users and they are the biggest groups that hackers are interested in it gets attacked the most. When you look at percentage of browsers used many of the lesser browsers are mainly used by ordinary people in their own homes. Microsoft currently has 48% of the market because most of it's products interact with it's browser. Probably OneNote (a Lotus Notes type product) is the product which is used the most with IE. The next most used browser is FireFox (18% of the market) which incidentally has had 72 security breaches patch this year (according to their own website) and there are a few that still have not been fixed. According to CNET Chrome (17% of the market) is by far the worse with Google holding off for over six months before apply over 20 patches in July this year that fixed serious security breaches. When you compare this to Microsoft that is continuing to release patches to fix these breaches then Microsoft clearly comes out on top, it has to because of it's corporate customer base.

By the way if you look only at the corporate use of browsers then according to both CYGY and CNET Microsoft is well in front with just over 78% of the market.

FireFox 13, according to a report in the International Business Times in July 2012, is "plagued with security and privacy issues" the biggest being that the tabs hold secure data in cache which Mozilla is aware of and hopes to "fix in the next version of the browser". If it were Microsoft they would patch it straight away, they would have to, their corporate users would demand it of them.

So in my opinion the bigger the market share the more the attacks but for home users, who quite frankly the hackers are not particularly interested in, the best browser is the one you like the feel of the best. At the end of the day they are all susceptible to attack but what you should be more interested in is how quick the manufacturer responds to these attacks and having outstanding issues after such a long time and the attitude of "we will fix it in the next release" is just not good enough.

Sources.

Browser Market Share

International Business Times

[AnOther]

Unfortunately all browsers are vulnerable to so called 'zero day' exploits and the relative suppliers can only ever hope to play catchup.

FWIW the IBT report is 3 months old and FF is currently on v15.0.1, a far cry from v13 !

Nothing will ever persuade me to use IE unless forced to by badly written sites which only render correctly in it.

Apart from any other considerations I just don't like it and FF with it's wealth of addons gives me the browser I want and need.

[5-element]

The mature computer geeks who run my current "informatique" class (all 6 of them) , are completely paranoid over internet security and devote several hours to imparting their pooled wisdom on that topic -  two of the teachers are supposedly trained in "desinfection" - and they claim that at least 50% PCs have varying degrees of malware. They all recommend FF, although some will have Chrome as well. They also claim that the free AV are as good as the paying ones such as Kasperky, provided you know what else to do (like making sure everything is up to date on the PC)

I was warned, a week ago, about that IE problem. I didn't do anything about it as it was beyond my capabilities [:'(] and was quite relieved when I found that it had apparently been fixed.

[Jako]

One of the biggest security problems is that most people feel secure once they have installed an anti-virus package. The software usually reports "you are secure". People actually believe this and never do a manual scan or take other preventive measures like a firewall.. This false sense of security makes users very vulnerable. When a scan reports 'nothing found' that is exactly correct: it does not mean your computer is clean, just that it could not find it.

I believe that in reality almost 100% of computers is infected with a kind of malware. Many (government sponsored) spyware is not even detectable, but a properly configured firewall will prevent unauthorised connections to the outside world.

I change detection software around once a month and almost every month the newly installed software detects 'stuff'  that the previous one did not..

[Théière]

If cookies watching your every move and purchasing is malware then yes 100% of computers do contain malware. Is that malware dangerous in the sense that it will cause id theft or irreparable damage to your system then no 100% of computers don't contain malware and new software will always find stuff the others didn't as some software manufacturers make up infections just so they can find and report it.

Microsoft will always have security threat risks because of the way they write the basic code which isn't secure but hey it does create an enormous global market for add ons.