Am 02.07.2008 um 02:27 schrieb Nick FitzGerald:
Paul Schmehl to Larry Seltzer:My completely non-scientific, unsupported-by-empirical-evidence answer is no. It's because people who use Firefox tend to be more aware of security threats and the need to keep software up to date. It could also be (at least in part) because Firefox has a built-in, enabled-by-default, updateavailable warning system.I would agree with both those reasons and add that FF updates are nothampered by the disabling of the inbuilt (and often seriously mistrusted)OS auto-update mechanisms. I also _suspect_ that a lot of pirated copies of Windows probably have system updates disabled.
Also, back when I was working in a big company, we had Windows2000 laptops that the admins seemed very conservative in patching (at least, if the output of hfnetcheck could be believed).
I imagine it's the same in a lot of other companies, if only for lack of time for integration-testing: there may be dozens of IE5.5-only intranet-applications that don't work with IE7 (or even 6) and that may even break after specific security patches have been applied. Some of these applications may be "legacy stuff" where the maintainer (probably an intern or a defunct company) is no longer around.
cheers, Rainer -- Rainer Duffner CISSP, LPI, MCSE rainer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx