Firefox or bust!

A quick check of our logs, this week, made me very happy as it appears an average of 11% of are using Linux/Mac/BSD/Unix as your operating system (well done!) and 45% of you are using Firefox, or other advanced browsers to surf the site and the Internet. That's very heartening as Dewi, our CTO, sent me a worrying report from the Washington Post earlier. I had read it on The Register earlier but when it hits mainstream newspapers like the Post, then it can be widely assumed to be received wisdom.

Now I've been using alt.browsers on a daily basis since 1998 but Dewi, being the arch-skeptic and arch pragmatist isn't so easily swayed by IT theology and security industry scaremongering. However, the fact that rootkit-worthy exploits were left outstanding and unpatched for 284 days of last year's 365 days seems to have been the last straw for him. This is not just shocking; it's scandalous!

For the past couple of years there's been a bit of a statistical bun-fight over who's more secure, Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox and various metrics have obscured the real, salient issue - what was your risk status using these browsers? At the end of the day you were at risk of someone else owning your computer remotely for, at most, 9 days straight last year if you used Firefox. For Internet Explorer, there were vast lengths of weeks and weeks on end of risk of quite serious, remote exploits.

But security doesn't say it all; FireFox has had a spell checker extension for years; that's years longer than IE has had, and if I recall correctly it comes built in by default in Firefox 2. And the eco-system of must-have third party extensions available for Firefox makes it a kind of browsing crack that can't be done without.

So why do people use IE? Inertia. Habit. Lack of interest. Well, I've just led you to water. Drink if you wanna; you really should coz there's just no reason whatsoever to stay with the default choice now. None.