Firefox is most vulnerable web browser: report

Danish computer security service provider, Secunia, says Firefox is the most vulnerable web browser in wide use today. It also ranks Opera as the safest, though not by a wide margin, over Safari, and Internet Explorer.

Secunia said Firefox had nearly four times as many vulnerabilities as each of those browsers in 2008. The report found that Firefox had 115 vulnerabilities reported in 2008, compared to 30 for Opera, 31 for Internet Explorer, and 32 for Safari.

Not everything is hunky –dory with the Internet Explorer, however, with ActiveX still being a browser plug-in, or add-on, with the most number of vulnerabilities – a massive 366. This compares to 54 for Java, 30 for QuickTime, 19 for Flash and one for a Firefox extension.

No Opera widgets displayed any vulnerability.

Internet Explorer also has a much longer lag time between a vulnerability being discovered and a patch being issued for it. The lag for Internet Explorer, according to Secunia, was between 78 to more than 294 days. It said some vulnerabilities remained un-patched by year's end.

For Firefox, the lag ranged between 15 to 86 days. It didn't compare how long Safari and Opera took to patch.

Secunia is best known for tracking vulnerabilities in more than 12400 pieces of software and operating systems.

Vulnerabilities are areas of a browser that need to fixed, or patched, so that malicious users are not able to exploit it to steal sensitive data from a end user, or damage the browser itself.