A reader of the Redmond Report, a column run by Redmond magazine writers says Firefox is inferior to Internet Explorer when it comes to security. This is what he, David, had to say:

"I don't care how many patches are released for IE, or how few for Firefox. I patch Microsoft products with WSUS, which automatically approves critical and security patches so they install on all the client PCs without admin or user involvement. Even if the PC is sitting at a log-in prompt, IE will be patched automatically. And I have an e-mail waiting for me each morning to notify me of errors or problems.

With Firefox, I'm relying on an update mechanism that cannot be monitored, and requires user intervention to initiate updates. It's the most administrator-unfriendly program I've allowed on my network.

I don't have any unpatched instances of IE on my business LAN. I hope that's true of Firefox, as well, but I have no easy way of knowing. It only takes one unpatched vulnerability, so unless Firefox can assure me that it'll never require even a single security patch, I'm at much greater risk from Firefox than I ever will be from IE. As a user, I'd probably prefer Firefox, but not from the admin standpoint."'

Well, this may be all well and good for a more experienced computer user, but I'd contend for the average and the casual computer user Firefox is overall the wiser choice of the two.

He does have a point about the update mechanism though; why can't Mozilla's browser install updates automatically? Especially for those who don't use their browser every day, this would seem to be common sense, and surely it wouldn't be hard to implement. Hopefully we don't have to wait for Firefox 4 for this sort of thing.

In either case, I'm very happy with the browser and won't be switching back to IE anytime soon. Of course, I'm kind of stubborn (this was the very thing which made me reluctant to switch to Firefox in the first place years ago). Does this change anyone else's mind?