Mozilla security issues

[duh]

Hello, with the problems related to IE, I was thinking about trying out Mozilla.

My question is, wouldn't a browser that is open source be less secure? Wouldn't people know how to better attack it?

Thanks

[khp]

With all other things beeing equal, yes a completely closed source application might be might achive a better safety record than an open souce application. Because it might be easier to find security holes such as buffer overflows, in a open source application.

But all other things are not equal, the fact that MSIE has much more users than Mozilla, makes it a more popular target. Futher more many hackers around the world considers MS to be the souce of all evil, while few people think the same of mozilla. And I strongly suspect that the vast majority of the people who writes viruses are politically motivated, rather than just plain evil.

In addition, the fact that IE is closed souce, doesn't mean it's difficult to obtain information about how to make an attack. With each of it's security updates Microsoft usually gives quite detailed information about what problem the patch is supposed to fix. And since few people are ever completly up to date with all the security fixes, this information is extremely usefull for hackers.

Finally Mozilla has some big advantages over IE (security wise), no VBScript support, and move finely tuned control over javascript execution permissions.