True enough, that.
> If however you had different browsing habits,...
I've heard estimates that over 80% of porn and other "edgy" sites are infection vectors. Flies to sugar. Or maybe flies to sh*t... :)
> Yes it has definitely taken a long time to secure Windows compared to Mac, but there are several reasons for that - much bigger target, less secure habits of users, many more 3rd party apps and many more features built into the O/S.
And let's not forget that not too many years ago, Microsoft was still adding "cool" features like automatically executing programs that arrive attached to email without "bothering" to notify the user (ah, for the innocence of the old internet!). It takes many years to convince the software guys that they really have to rip that crap out because the bad guys are taking advantage of it.
And there's Marketing's idea of feature sets. Microsoft is heavily invested in its ever-growing features list -- after all that's the only leverage they have to make people pay them more money year after year. Well, that and making new versions of essential applications incompatible with older versions of Windows... (cough) IE9/XP (cough) IE10/Vista (cough).
Of course, Apple does exactly the same thing with their OS, apps, and hardware. Such is the reality of the business... but security-wise Apple had the advantage of starting over in the late 90's, by layering their GUI over an established BSD Unix foundation. They leapfrogged Windows like it wasn't even there. OTOH, if Apple had tried to merely "improve" the old MacOS the way Microsoft continues to merely "improve" NT, Apple would have died out completely by 2003.
When do you suppose Microsoft will finally stop polishing the NT turd, and put the Windows GUI over Unix? (And I'm only half kidding: Microsoft was a Unix house two decades before Apple became one, and they know it's the right way to do things.) Opinion?
Holy cow does that bring back some memories! How long did that feature even last, about a month was about all wasn't it? I remember the day I found out about it, and I thought to myself this must be the stupidest idea ever. To this day might still take the cake! But they're still always adding new things in there, which is its best selling point, along with backwards compatibility. As for them converting to *nix, probably never, for those two reasons alone, which sell more copies than better security ever will to most folks.