Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

For many of you this post will instantly be filed under “Duh!”; but for many others, hopefully it will get you to think a bit.

A few days ago I sent an email to our IT director, this is how it went…

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who has written books about security and cryptography and is internationally renowned for his smarts. I was reading on his website where he sums up this study done on the security of the main web browsers in the marketplace, and the results are remarkable. The gist of it is that 98% of the days during the year-long study the web browser MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) was unsafe. Compared to Firefox which was unsafe only 15% of the time, and Opera 17% of the time.

Based on this, I suggest we make a move to have all our company using Firefox as the default web browser ASAP. It’s a great browser, very fast, and very compatible. In fact it’s more feature rich and standards compatible than IE is. It imports all your IE settings on install and it’s free.

I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, I thought I’d share it with you. If you, dear reader, are still using IE, I hope you realize the risk you’re taking. You can install all the latest patches and use all sorts of virus/spyware protection, but you are still exposed 98% of the time.

Read Shneier’s post here, and the original study done by Scanit here. Oh, and don’t forget to download Firefox.