Re: Good general purpose heuristic
On Saturday 22nd September at 20:16 RICHTO said, "But the main alternatives - Firefox, Safari, Chrome all have far more vulnerabilities than current IE versions! Are we to go without a browser?!"
I know that historically Firefox (as an example) has, during certain time frames, had a larger number of bugs and vulnerabilities than say IE. Now, I am not saying that I don't believe you here 'RICHTO', but I would be interested to any data upon which this statement is based (assuming of course that any data has not been either sourced from, or sponsored by, Microsoft - either directly or indirectly).
From figures I have seen previously, Microsoft's biggest past failure has been the time frame within which many issues were addressed. Again, I would be interested to see any independent data on this too.
But your comment does hint at a valid point, and one that I see almost daily. That is, people saying things like, "Oh. I won't have any problems as I don't use IE any more". (Comments akin to this are also posted on The Register from time to time).
IMO the IT community in general, with all it's whinging about IE, leads many to think that other browsers are safe and secure. There's a lot of Microsoft bashing that goes on - some valid, some not - but the IT community does both itself and others a disservice when it fails to equally address similar issues in other UA's.