According to the BBC:
Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed...Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.
But, in a related article in Information Week, Firefox leads the list of most vulnerabable applications.
Safari has been getting hammered lately, and don't even start me on Opera or Chrome.
Consumers are running out of obscure internet browsers to switch to. And even if they do switch, en-masse switching makes the browser-of-last-resort "popular" thus attracting hackers to it and exposing all the latent defects the manufacturer failed to detect. The advice from cyber security experts to switch browsers is hardly responsible at this point in time.
Switching browsers is like switching cigarette brands.
You cannot run from bad software. You cannot hide from it. The market rewards its creation and thus no matter where you turn, insecure software will be there to meet you. We must face into it and demand crashworthy software from our manufacturers, no matter who they might be, no matter how hard it might seem. It is not a fast solution. It is not an easy solution, but it is a needed solution [see Democratizing Cyber Security].
If the current crop of cyber security products and pratices were the "answer" to our collective vulnerability, surely their sheer abundance would have made a big difference by now.
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