Alternate browsers gaining critical mass?
This Wired story claims that now that Internet Explorer is losing market share, advertising folks and spyware authors will start targeting alternative browsers like Mozilla/Firefox. This will be a great test of the debate over whether Free Software apps are more secure due to design or due to the low payoff potential associated with Free Software. In other words, if you can infect 6 million people using IE or 1 million people using Mozilla, which user would you target? If we don’t see a spyware problem associated with Mozilla/Firefox, then I guess those MS apologists who say the only reason there are so many security problems with MS products is because everybody uses them will be proven wrong. If we do see a spyware problem with alternate browsers, then Free Software advocates will have to eat at least a little crow.
