Is Firefox still safer than Internet Explorer?

In a recent article Brian Livingston, the editor at WindowsSecrets.com in my opinion concluded a very convincing …Yes. In the article he details the number of security holes in each browser and the time they were left unpatched. There are some pretty convincing statistics from Scanit NV, an international security company.

IE suffered from unpatched security holes for 359 days in 2004

Attacks on IE weaknesses circulated “in the wild” for 200 of those days

Mozilla and Firefox patched all vulnerabilities before hacker code circulated

Whilst no one would suggest that Firefox is bug and security hole free it’s clear that whilst Firefox security holes are generally fixed within days in Internet Expolorer these fixes can take weeks and leave users vulnerable for much longer.