Internet Explorer users are as much as 21 times more likely to end up with spyware on their computers than those who use Mozilla's Firefox browser, academic researchers said. Two University of
Washington professors and two graduate students sent Web crawlers to scour 45,000 malicious Web sites for executable files that exposed unpatched versions of IE and Firefox to so-called drive-by
downloads. When prompted to download a file they'd never requested, the group's IE computer was infected 1.6 percent of the time when responding "yes." Even when the group clicked "no," 0.6 percent of
the domains installed the drive-by on the IE computer anyway. By contrast, 0.9 percent of the domains infected the Firefox browser when the group input "yes," while none of the domains infected it
when the group input "no." While these numbers may not seem like much, the professors said one must consider the billions and billions of Web pages out there. With IE, most of the exploits were based
on AcitveX and JavaScript vulnerabilities--two technologies that have long taken the blame for many IE problems. Firefox does not support ActiveX; many of its supporters believe that to be a big
reason why Firefox is considered to be a more secure browser.
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