Open Source is the future as Firefox storms ahead

Open Source is the future as Firefox storms ahead
Even as the hype and hoopla surrounding the release of Internet Explorer 7.0 continues to circulate online, it is Firefox, which is quietly doing a great job and is in fact generating more interest that anything that is on the anvil from Redmond at the moment.

Open Source, of which Firefox is a worthy representative, is also gaining thanks to the minimal security that seems to guard commercial software these days. The decision by Dell not to package the operating system into its computers and notebooks is a very significant one and a real triumph for the advocates of the Open Source software in general and the Linux OS in particular. The decision by the French Police to ditch IE in favor of Firefox is an equally telling statement.

One of the main problems that seems to be hounding commercial software makers and especially Microsoft is the fact that the appearance of a security glitch takes ages to get fixed. Brian Krebs writes in today's editions of the Washington Post that according to his estimates "Mozilla averaged about 21 days before it issued fixes for flaws in Firefox, compared with the 135 days it took for Microsoft to address problems."

This is a damning statement and really the one thing that is plaguing Redmond's products through and through. And one can only conclude that no matter what new-fangled features are introduced in IE 7, users will approach it cautiously and it will not get embraced as quickly as Firefox is at the moment.

However, to be fair to Microsoft, the fact that it is the world's largest company does make it a vulnerable target for virus writers, but then that is no excuse to let critical flaws run for months without patching them up. And as long as the Internet Explorer supports the ActiveX and JavaScript controls, it will remain a soft target for insertion of malware and it will gain notoriety as an unsafe browser.

That is why it is imperative that Redmond addresses this issue before going public with its new browser. Otherwise, malware writers will surely take it to the cleaners.