Ditto...but watch the viruses begin.
As with any Mozilla browser far and away better and faster than IE.
It is not the browser that is suseptble to virus it i the operating system, Windows, so do not get rid of your virus check or your spywarechecker just because you are using Firefox
I'm sure you're right. Viruses were being written for IE because that's the one that everybody has been using. Now that Firefox is popular, I'm sure the hackers are already turning their attention to it.
Exactly. And the same thing will happen with Linux if it every deveops a large marketshare.
Everyone puts MS down, and sometimes for good reason, but the main reason there are so many security flaws is that every hacker in the world pokes away at it constantly. We are talking hundreds, maybe thousands, attacking it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Nothing could stand up to that much malicious activity.
We are going to see a lot of FireFox flaws and I can't wait for the anti-MS people to start bad mouthing it as vehemently as they do Internet Explorer.
Every thread about Firefox has a a bunch of folks chime in to claim that because Firefox is gaining in popularity, that it will start to claim its share of viruses, worms, spyware and malware.
The problem is, we're just not seeing it happen yet, nor do I think it is likely to at least anywhere near close to the level that it does today with IE. While Forefox, like any complex program, is not perfect, it just doesn't have the same level of OS integration as IE does, which is the vector normally taken by malware because it makes the job of malware writers so much easier than it would otherwise be. So, while Firefox is not perfect, and will never be, especially since so much active development is occuring on it, it will most likely continue to be safer than IE for the forseeable future even though IE is, for the most part, in maintennance mode and has been for years.
Having smaller market share does not protect one from being attacked. That's just a FUD point that is bandied about because it sounds reasonable. I ask you to consider the following as a lesson in how even small targets are easy to hit in today's internet era.
Softwarecreator, you often ask if those of us cheering Firefox on have an economic basis in our hopes. I'd imagine that for the most part, in the most commonly accepted meaning of the term, that would not be true. However, we do have a direct interest in seeing the number of rogue spam bots and zombies being reduced. I have to filter out all the attacks on my webservers by zombies looking for machines to compromise when I run my traffic analysis. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these zombies out there, and they do affect the bandwidth available for legitimate use of the internet. This is the primary basis for my desire that Microsoft and their customers get their acts together.
The following is a post I put together to illustrate that obscurity doesn't help you if someone wants to make you a target:
Oh, I don't know. Perhaps as someone else already said on this thread, it might be done for the bragging rights of having created the first successful virus/worm to attack Macs.
I've seen this charge that the small market share that Mac and Linux have is what keeps them safe. It is repeated often enough and seems reasonable enough until you actually look at the history of some other worms/viruses.
Consider: the spread of the Witty Worm.
Quoth the poster:
Witty infected only about a tenth as many hosts than the next smallest widespread Internet worm. Where SQL Slammer infected between 75,000 and 100,000 computers, the vulnerable population of the Witty worm was only about 12,000 computers. Although researchers have long predicted that a fast-probing worm could infect a small population very quickly, Witty is the first worm to demonstrate this capability. While Witty took 30 minutes longer than SQL Slammer to infect its vulnerable population, both worms spread far faster than human intervention could stop them. In the past, users of software that is not ubiquitously deployed have considered themselves relatively safe from most network-based pathogens. Witty demonstrates that a remotely accessible bug in any minimally popular piece of software can be successfully exploited by an automated attack.
I suspect there are more than 12,000 Linux and/or Mac hosts out there on the internet.
Also, consider that the folks who were hit with this were also among the more security-concious users:
The vulnerable host population pool for the Witty worm was quite different from that of previous virulent worms. Previous worms have lagged several weeks behind publication of details about the remote-exploit bug, and large portions of the victim populations appeared to not know what software was running on their machines, let alone take steps to make sure that software was up to date with security patches. In contrast, the Witty worm infected a population of hosts that were proactive about security -- they were running firewall software. The Witty worm also started to spread the day after information about the exploit and the software upgrades to fix the bug were available.
Show me a successful worm/virus against Macs and I'll listen. Until then, your talking point is FUD.