This doesn’t come as a big surprise, but according to statistics at Washington Post’s Security Fix, Internet Explorer has been unsafe to use the better part of 2006., or precisely 284 days. It makes you wonder whether it’s easier to count the days it was safe. This tells us two things: lots of IE security vulnerabilities have been found in 2006. and, more importantly, Microsoft has been painfully slow at fixing them. This is pretty much why everyone has been switching to Firefox and will continue to do so unless IE7 proves to be absolutely stellar when it comes to security problems, which I sincerely doubt.

Luckily, you, the readers of this site, mostly already know this, because 67.7% of you used Firefox in December 2006., while only 17.4% used IE, half of which were using IE 6.0. This is a sample of about 100.000 users, so I find it quite accurate, at least when it comes to this site. I know the visitors of an IT news site such as franticindustries are more prone to using Firefox, but these numbers make it hard for me to believe that IE still has over 80% of the market, as you can often read in the news.