Ron Johnson wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 07/26/07 15:52, Erik Persson wrote:Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:It seems that the mozilla-derived browsers have security issues requiring updates far more frequently than other browsers like Konqueror or links2.I'm curious as to why this is. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm on dialup and switched to Konq for this very reason but sometimes Ihave a website that doesn't work and its handy to see if iceweasel will view it. (so far the only one is the adobe flashplayer test page). Doug.As you can see from the other answers, nobody has a clue if the mozilla-based browsers are less secure than the konq or not. I haven't inspected the code either, so I don't have any more facts than anyone else. I do NOT agree with the other answers however. If there are fewer security alerts with Konq the only reasonable conclusion, if you don't have strong facts pointing the other way, is that Konq is more secure, and that this is partly because of better code. The larger userbase of Firefox is very likely to generate a larger number of discovered security issues, but as far as I know, no one can tell you how many more bugs are generated per user or per extra programmer, and probably no one can tell you the how user base and security issue rate correlate more precisely. From this, the most reasonable conclusion is that Konq is more secure. Anyhow, the basic fact that there is fewer security alerts in Konq makes this a more secure browser, whether this maybe is because only of a smaller user base or not.That's just not logical. For example, just because people didn't know about germs in 1825 didn't mean that they didn't exist.
That's just the point. You can't be sure about firefox being less secure - there could be reasons that explains the assumed difference in reported security issues and yet firefox being more secure. However, if we don't know, we can't say. We can only say what we know, and what this is likely to represent. Exactly as it would have been very unwise to argue for the existence of germs in 1825 without having some evidence of their existence.
As I said, we must have some strong evidence to argue that the assumed larger rate of reported security issues in firefox is not because of more security flaws.
If there are fewer reported security issues in konq, the most likely explanation is that there are fewer found security issues in konq. If there are fewer found security issues in konq, one likely explanation is that there are fewer security issues in konq. There are however more people using firefox and there are more developers(?) developing firefox, but since we have no clue as to how this equates to the above, we really can't say much about it other than that it will probably decrease the difference to some extent (maybe all the way, maybe to the degree that konq is less secure - but we don't know). As long as nobody is interested in exploiting the konq bugs and everyone wants to exploit the firefox bugs, I will be more secure using konq even if there are more flaws in konq. Security when using a browser has to do with the risk being attacked, not the number of presumed security flaws in the code (even if this if one factor that influences the risk of being attacked). Is there any reason to believe that people are more interested in finding security problems in firefox? yes there is - more bugs are found in firefox according to the OP. What I'm saying here is that the larger user base probably will lead to more security issues being found and corrected in firefox, but it will also lead to firefox being more of a target, and this will to some extent reduce the advantage of having more eyes on the code.
This sounds as if I advocate for security by obscurity, which is not the case. In the long run, the code with the larger number of eyes on it will be more secure and the better choice from a security standpoint. In a situation in which one product seems to have more reported security flaws than the other, but more users and developers looking at the code, the situation is not as easy.
- -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA
/Erik Persson.