Firefox Buggiest Browser, but fastest to fix? Also, some virus protection and PC performance tips
Firefox has increased its market share significantly in the browser market in recent years. Last month a report showed that it has for the first time exceeded 20% for a full month. Almost anyone that is familiar with using the internet regularly at a high level has switched over to Firefox as their main browser although as that report shows, Internet Explorer is still the king of market share for browsers at a whopping 67% although this is a drop of around 7 percentage point in the last year. Safari, an Apple browser, has third place with roughly 8% market share.
Many of the complaints about Internet Explorer compared to Firefox have always been the security issues between the two. According to the Secunia browser vulnerability report, Firefox had more bugs than all other browsers combined last year and nearly twice as many as Microsoft and Apple combined.
At the same time Firefox reportedly fixed these issues much faster than Microsoft for publicly reported without vendor notification. According to CNET: These “zero day” vulnerability disclosures contain information that can be used by attackers to write exploits for the flaw. The longer it takes vendors to release an update that repairs the vulnerability, the longer users of the browser are at risk.
Secunia reported six incidences in which Microsoft was publicly notified of browser vulnerabilities, two of which the security company labeled as “high” or “moderate” in severity. Meanwhile, Mozilla experienced three such occurrences, all of which Secunia labeled as “less critical” or “not critical.”
Microsoft took 110 days to issue patches for the two most serious flaws, while it took Mozilla an average of 43 days to address its three flaws, Secunia reported. One of the IE vulnerabilities remained open for 294 days in 2008, according to the report. You would have been able to build your own Ebel watch by the time that got fixed.
Mozilla issued another update Wednesday, and the second in the last month, that is said to target six critical vulnerabilities found in Firefox 3.0.6, the most serious of which could allow attackers to run arbitrary code on a victim’s computer.
While they are faster to make the fix, it still doesn’t make it any less important to focus your overall computer protection from various adware, viruses, and spyware. Even as a rabid virus scanner, and computer protector myself, I have had 2 viruses in the last year alone that had nothing to do with looking at porn, or downloading from a p2p format.
I have had to find a few new programs to run them out. Most free anti-virus software programs are rather weak in this regard. AVG Free for one rarely finds a virus in my experience that I end up finding another way, but uses very little system resources. Avast does better, but isn’t exactly great either and tends to eat up a lot of system resources to run it all the time. It does however tend to find more in a scan than AVG does. I tend to run AVG Free always as a protection source, but once i find a problem on my PC I will always download Avast again and run a scan to find the rest when I am notified by AVG. Avast scan in combination with an AVG find will typically find it better and allow you to delete it easier than AVG ever will.
In my experience neither of these did well enough to be the only thing I needed to do. Finding viruses, malware, spyware, and adware just doesn’t come with out having to do various scans in addition to using these programs.
If you haven’t downloaded, and been using it regularly to do scans I suggest that you immediately download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. This program has saved me more times than I can count. It finds so much more than anything else does, and it also finds trojans. It is by far the fastest and most accurate of these programs I have run a crossed in recent years.
In addition to Malwarebytes I tend to still run the old standard Spybot Search and Destroy as well. IT still does a rather good job of getting rid of adware at the very least. Although Malwarebytes finds most of this, there have been times I have found more with a Spybot scanning after the fact.
I run these programs regularly as well as some of the standard Windows PC clean up utilities. It is a good idea to run these very regularly. I don’t know how many times I have gotten on someone’s PC and saw how sluggish they were simply because they don’t know to run these clean up utilities on a regular basis.
These are my Standard PC (Windows) System Performance Tips for the average (less than computer literate) person
Run these Weekly:
1. Disk Clean Up-Found in the Start Menu. Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools
This cleans a bunch of junk out of your system that helps it run a bit better. Temp files, Recycling Bin, etc. I would select most of the optons to delete. The first time may take a while, but if run weekly it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.
2. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware-At the very least UPDATE the definitions, and then run a “Quick Scan”. If anything is there it will find it.It is very fast. Takes less than 10 inutes usually.
3. Your anti-virus software of choice-These take a while and I suggest you set them up to run automatically as a scan in the options while you are sleeping once a week. No need to run this every day. If you have a virus you probably know it already and this should have already found it when you got it rather than having to do a scan. The scan itself is a just in case precaution.
Every 2-4 weeks:
4. Spybot Search and Destroy-I Update this every week, but may only run it once every 2-4 weeks since Malwarebytes does the job most of the time.
5. Disc Defragmenter-Found in Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools in your start menu. This program is an absolute must. This will speed up your PC immensely if you ahve never done this before. The If it is the first time you ever ran it you could be looking at a few hours. If you run it monthly it should take up to 1 hour to run,b ut usually much less. What this does is compact your hard drive so that your PC doesn’t have to search as hard for programs and files when opening things up. It also gets rid of a lot of stray junk that you have probably deleted. In short it just makes everything run a bit faster.
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While this may seem time consuming it really isn’t that big of deal. Most of them you can run in less than 30 minutes, and as long as you keep them in mind to run you can run them when you are doing other things off the PC. Like taking a shower, making lunch, etc. I tend to run them while I do some cleaning around the house most of the time. You will be amazed at the difference it makes if you don’t exactly run this stuff on a Windows PC often.
If anyone has any other suggestion, by all means make a comment. This by know means is the Bible for PC performance. Just the standard way that I find to keep this metal box running better than most of the PCs people have out there.
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Filed under: Adware, Spyware, Viruses, Computers and Internet by JMH
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i am only using free virus scanners like avast and avira but they seem to be great tools though;*.
i always use free virus scanners on the internet coz they are quite good too*.’