Microsoft is promising a more-secure IE 7? In other words, Bill saw the gains being made by Firefox and is now hurrying IE to market ahead of the next version of Windows. Well, good for him for recognizing a threat earlier than he did with Netscape back in the day.

yes and didn't microsoft promise a more secure IE 6.0?

I still rely on Mozilla 1.6

"Microsoft is promising a more-secure, Internet Explorer 7.0 this summer."

And you are going to believe them.

It's crazy to still be using MS IE, with all of the known and yet undiscovered security bugs... plus the general annoyance factor.

At home, I have used nothing but first Mozilla and now Firefox for the last couple of years. No pop-ups, and no surfing problems except at a couple of MS-related sites.

Many workplaces, however, refuse to allow employees to download and install any alternative browsers. "Our IT dept. only supports MS products, you know."

Very short-sighted of them...

I am militant in my defense of Firefox. To use anything else is like letting burglars have free access to your home.

Seppo, I had the opposite problem. Our IT guy allows Firefox, but he has crippled IE with mandatory security settings so it is all but unusable. I recently switched to Firefox, learned it on company time, and I'm liking it a lot.

Now I need a good extension to manage my link-packrat collection of 10,000's of bookmarks...

This is actually very good news for Firefox users. The reason so few security breaches are found against Firefox (and subsequently taken advantage of) is because it is so relative unpopular. It's not worth the hacker's time.

Were Firefox to have the same widespread popularity as IE... you'd find that just as many security holes would be found and exploited.

That's not absolutely true, Nick. I'm a member of my local MS Architect's council, and I can tell you that IE suffers from bugs that aren't present in any other browser. Most of them are because MS wanted to make a browser the end-all-be-all user interface and that's asking for trouble. If it weren't so tied in with the OS, it would be a much better product.

I love MS and .Net, but IE simply sucks.

Yes, Robert, I do believe him.

MS has Gotten Serious about security. (Laugh all you want, it's true, and laughing won't change it.) Yeah, they still have lots of bugs and vulnerabilities found; but that's inevitable with their god-only-knows-how-big installed base of old code.

I expect IE7 will be much more secure, and it might well be just as good as Firefox.

Full disclosure: Every time I try to use Firefox I end up screaming at it because it's so sucky, but maybe they just can't do OSX properly.

I'm not saying that IE doesn't have problems... but so does Firefox... its just that not that many people are hunting for them right now.

Wired has an interesting article about it.

I know I've opened up a pandora's box of religious arguments by daring to suggest that Firefox isn't perfect... but let's be realistic here.

sig, i use firefox in osx without any trouble. i use it more than safari because for some reason safari doesn't render my own darn site properly.
i never use ie on my macs. at work i have a xp box, and i haven't put firefox on it yet.

I'm as agnostic as it comes when it comes to computer stuff. I find I can make my money regardless of platform / browser. The more open I am to other systems, the more open I am for future employment.

FF is not perfect. There is no such thing. The most secure PC is one encased in uranium surrounded by rebar enforeced concrete, and buried 3 miles beneath the sea floor. Even then it's still possible to break into it. But FF is MUCH more secure than IE and the Internet is just a dangerous time right now to be using it.

Spelling errors are on me this time, free of charge...

Netscape opened up a whole new world to computer users and forced Microsoft to develop and integrate it to the point where we take it for granted. It didn't last on the stock market, but in the history books it will have its place. Firefox advocates can only dream that their system could do as much to change the world as Netscape did with the launch of their first browsers for ordinary computer users.

I use Firefox, and for the most part, love it. But it's a browser, and we've seen those before. If it outdoes IE, cool. If it forces IE to outdo it, cool. Just so browsing gets better.

But the next Netscape? We can only hope.

You know, technically, Stephen, Firefox is the next Netscape.

All FireFox users might want to consider installing the new 1.0.1 update to fix some known bugs and vulnerabilities.

Be careful how you interpret these statistics. Yes, the growth has slowed down a bit from month to month. But that growth is still absolutely explosive, 15% growth in five weeks, at that rate of growth firefox would have 50% marketshare in 14 months (compared to 10 months for the 22% per 5 weeks growth rate). This is not insignificant.

56 security issues in Firefox in the last 12 months. Before anyone whines that Firefox was in beta 12 months ago, 55 out of 56 of those issues were also present in Mozilla 1.7x.

Firefox is just a pretty face on the insecure Mozilla codebase.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html

This is a higher number of security issues than IE 6 over the same period by far, and IE was the big target for hackers. Now that Firefox is a target ... its poor track record on security is catching up with it.

IE 6 on XP SP2 has a good track record on security.

"i use firefox in osx without any trouble. i use it more than safari because for some reason safari doesn't render my own darn site properly."

My main beef with Safari is that it won't import my bookmarks. I have 10 years worth of them (yes, Ive been on the web that long), and I use some of them regualrly.

I mainly love Firefox/Mozilla for the tabs and extensions, and the bookmark management is much easier than with IE.

Yes, I'm sure all those folks with 98SE and Win2kPro are looking forward to MSIE7.

Oh, what's that, you say? It'll only work on XP SP2?

I like MS OK, but MSIE's a dog.

I have used Firefox exclusively at home and tried it out at work. I've noticed a couple of work Intranet sites block me because I was not using Explorer. I have also found that Firefox does not handle some plugins, specifically Adobe: sites with .pdf content do not load in Firefox and I have to return to explorer.