Perdition said:
if Firefox held the majority market share then hackers would target it.
This is a common misconception/misunderstanding. The majority of security problems in IE are not "because hackers target it", they're because there are FLAWS in the product (sometimes by mistake, sometimes by design). But it's actually entirely possible to build a secure web browser (or any other piece of software for that matter) that holds up
no matter how many hackers attack it. I'm not saying FF is that secure, that's unlikely, but it's even more unlikely that it will be anywhere near as insecure as IE has been. Also many of the IE problems are due to MS's support of ActiveX, which the FF guys vehemently (and wisely) refuse to add. How secure a product is has little to do with the number of hackers who target it, it has to do with how many bugs and bad design decisions are in the product.
Also how do you get millions of people to keep their Firefox up to date when flaws are found (and they will be)?
Very good point/question .. fortunately the FF developers
are busy building in an auto-update mechanism. I agree, FF will fail without one, because the first major flaw to be exploited on a large scale could bite a lot of people otherwise.
IE was being developed at a time when the buzzword was "features" not "security".
That is absolutely not true. This is revisionism. Anyone in the industry who followed the development of web browsers at all from the "early days" will know that security has ALWAYS been pointed out as an extremely crucial consideration above "features". Microsoft just chose to ignore what *everyone* was saying. If you recall Java was developed around an extremely strict and well-designed security model long before MS last-minute pushed an extremely insecure ActiveX model into IE just because they were late to market and needed *an* embeddable object model system for IE. And EVERYBODY (in IT) knew it was going to be a security f*ckup
from day one. Sun's Java was in fact one of the reasons that people were
already very conscious of security at the time; firstly because none of the security issues were new (all decades old), and secondly because Sun for years heavily advertised security as one of the major selling points of Java. If you read ANY comparitive reviews during the early development of browsers you will see that Microsoft's model was criticised right from the start, long before the first auto-install spyware was even conceived. Ultimately though it seems people were willing to
forgo security for convenience in the naive and blind hope that nothing bad would happen.
