Security vendor Secunia ApS is reporting that users of Mozilla Firefox are more likely to have installed the latest security updates than Web surfers running Internet Explorer or Opera. This can be explained with the fact users have to choose to use Firefox, possibly because they find the browser more secure, and the built-in updater within the open-source browser. Secunia's analysis is based on more than 350,000 software checks, performed over the past five months by its free Secunia Software Inspector service.
According to Secunia, 5.19% of all Firefox 2 users had missed security updates. For IE6, which is used by nearly half of all Web surfers, that number was 9.61%. Microsoft's latest IE7 browser had a number much closer to Firefox's results: 5.40%. Opera was the least likely to be patched: 11.96% of all Opera 9.x browsers were missing updates. Secunia also found that 28% of all programs on PCs it scanned were not fully updated, meaning browsers are much more likely to be patched than other types of software.
News source: PC World
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