Firefox in the NYT
Thursday, December 16th, 2004
It’s getting hard to ignore the popularity of Firefox. With the release of Firefox 1.0 and 11 million downloads since November, the Spread Firefox team decided to broaden the campaign further by placing a two-page ad in the New York Times. Look closely at the background: there are 10,000 names of people listed from the community who contributed funds for the ad.
Of course I support Firefox because it is open-source, but I also think Firefox is a faster and more usable browser. I’ve been talking to friends at work, and I didn’t realize how badly people are afflicted with spyware and viruses. Firefox is better suited to security because it is written carefully and supported responsively by the community.
The statistics speak for themselves. Firefox has had 4 advisories in 2004, rated as moderate or low in criticality. That other browser has had 34 advisories in 2004, with over half of them rated as moderate to extremely critical. Even worse, half of the vulnerabilities for that other browser have no patches, some of which are highly critical. So, what are you waiting for?
This is one of the most 