full-disclosure - IE is just as safe as FireFox

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From: frank at knobbe.us (Frank Knobbe)
Subject: IE is just as safe as FireFox

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 18:18, Danny wrote:
> However, if Firefox or any other browser had the same market share as
> IE, would it really be that much more secure?

Wrong question. It's not the market share that makes system running IE
so insecure, but the tight integration into the system as a whole. You
open an email and bang... a remote shell spawns to Russia. If 98% of
Windows users were running Firefox or Opera, you still have insecure
systems because IE bites you in the butt through other means (Outlook,
Explorer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc, etc)

The obvious solution would be to uninstall IE and the whole Active X
scripting stuff... but then your system would be useless and not
functioning properly. (... which is funny since pretty much every other
OS can run without a @#$%^&*$ browser...)

Regards,
Frank

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