A couple weeks ago I blogged about Symantec's claims regarding the vulnerabilities of Firefox versus IE. As a follow up, a friend sent me a good opinion article by EWeek's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. In it, he debunks the 25 (FF) to 13 vulnerabilities comparison in part because of the speed of patching I mentioned previously, but also the numbers themselves appear to have been false. According to his source at Symantec:

"In the last reporting period, the second half of last year, Microsoft had acknowledged 13 vulnerabilities. We've now revised it to 31. The difference is that now Microsoft has acknowledged these vulnerabilities."

Well, that is a significant difference, and, if true, I take issue with Symantec's reporting altogether for spreading false perceptions. As with many things, the original number is widely reported while the revision goes generally unnoticed.

In reading Pete Freitag's CSS Post, one of the links talks about !important is ignored by IE (as well as the CSS child selector). In trying to fix my stylesheet, I happened upon something that is ignored (it would seem properly) by Firefox and not by IE (which I use to make IE only margins or placement):

The second top is read by IE and overwrites the first, while it is ignored by Firefox. This may be well documented, I have no idea. I found it by accident trying to comment out an item (and as I often note, I am not a designer). However, I have found it a simple and useful technique to use when things (as they usually do) just don't look right in IE.

MacCentral is reporting that Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report says that Mac users are "increasingly becoming a target for the malicious activity, contrary to popular belief that the Mac OS is immune to traditional security concerns." In addition, it states that "over the past six months, nearly twice as many vulnerabilities surfaced in Mozilla browsers as in Explorer." This is also contrary to the popular belief that the Firefox browser is more secure than IE.

Wired News is reporting on buzz surrounding a new open-source browser built upon Firefox called Flock. Many of the members of the Flock team come from the Mozilla Foundation, and they are apparently planning to send their new browser into beta in October (I signed up out of curiosity).

While I am not completely clear on what will make Flock unique, the creators are calling it a "social browsing experience" or "two-way web." Ha? Well, apparently it will integrate blogging tools, "play nicely" with web sites like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us, and "detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically." However, the goal is apparently not to compete with Firefox.

Ok...still unclear on what it is? So am I. You can read the article and go to the site yourself, and if you are clear...can you fill me in? Like I said, I signed up to maybe get an invite to the beta anyway...what the heck, right?

Another interesting news tidbit was this PC World Article stating recent research by NetApplications.com that indicates that "Firefox's share shrunk to 8.07 percent from 8.71 percent in June, while IE grew its market slice to 87.20 percent in July from 86.56 percent last month." They didn't really offer any potential explanation other than to state that they were "surprised" and that they had expected Firefox's market share gains to slow rather than start to decline. Obviously, IE 7 is not yet a factor...so what gives? Just a blip?