*UPDATE 9/10/2006: After reading some more “editorials from an analytical perspective” on the Popular Tecnology I now see that they are a Microsoft advocate blog pretending to be a impartial source. I think that sites like OSNews should be a little more careful when picking thier sources.

While browsing OS News I found a link to an article claiming that IE is more secure in 2006 than Firefox. They base this statement on the fact that Firefox had more vulnerabilities found this year. This is an extremely naive way to measure the security of a certain browser to another. There are several reasons why the metric they used to measure security is useless which I will briefly go over now.

First and most important is that they are basing their conclusions on the vulnerabilities found. Firefox is an open source project and IE is closed source. This means that one of the reasons more vulnerabilities were found, and subsequently patched, was due to the fact that there are many developers going over the code and checking it for problems. IE only has the Microsoft internal quality control team going over their closed source code, which has proven to be vastly inadequate over the course of Windows, Office, and IE life cycles.

Also, one of Microsofts security