Is your web browser up to date?

How up to date is your Web browser, because according to recently published research there are 637 million Internet users that are surfing with outdated and unpatched browsers ? That's a whopping 45% of all surfers.

Now this matters because only the latest versions with the most recent patches will have the best chance of resisting the various threats on the Internet of which there are plenty.

Using data from Google Web searches and security firm Secunia the researchers analysed the browsers used by millions of users. They were attempting to find out why so many recent attacks have been aimed at the browser, and why those attacks have been so successful.

The researchers report that in mid June 2008, the most commonly encountered browser technologies used to navigate the Internet were Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 78%, Mozilla’s Firefox (FF) 16%, Apple’s Safari (SF) 3%, and Opera (OP) 1%. The combined usage share of these four browsers was 98.6%, dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox.

That, on its own, may not seem very interesting. But what is interesting is the percentage of browsers which are the latest version: 83% of Firefox users had the most secure version while only 48% of Internet Explorer users were up to date, and it is 20 months since the latest version, IE7 was released.

Firefox makes it very easy to have the latest version, much easier than Internet Explorer, by offering to install the new version very soon after it is released, often the same day. Perhaps because Firefox is not so tightly integrated into Windows as Internet Explorer it is a small and quick update. Most users update within three days, which shows that the Firefox auto-update mechanism is very effective.

I’ll admit to a bit of bias here because I think that Firefox is, in almost every way, better than IE. The latest version, Firefox 3, was released in June and there were 8 million downloads in the first day. Firefox is generally considered to be faster, more secure, use less memory and be more useable than Internet Explorer. Firefox is also more standards complient so that more web paiges will display correctly.

If you want to give Firefox a try go to the Firefox home page .

If you do nothing else today make sure your browser is up to date. If you don’t you will regret it and probably soon too.

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry