Firefox, the Mozilla-sponsored alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser-is the beneficiary of some of the strongest buzz marketing ever seen.
Fans of the product even ponied up enough contributions to take out full-page newspaper ads touting the product. There are a lot of reasons to love Firefox-I use it myself almost exclusively-but the primary benefit noted everywhere is that it’s safe from the hackers who continue to exploit IE’s weaknesses.
According to an article by ZDNet’s George Ou, the claim is a house of cards. Ou tallied the number of vulnerabilities identified in each browser between March and September, and the results are surprising: There were 40 vulnerabilities in Firefox compared to only 10 in IE. Firefox didn’t fare much better in a tally of recent published exploits: 11 for Firefox compared to six for IE.
It just goes to prove that any popular software worth hacking that has security vulnerabilities will eventually have to deal with live working exploits. Firefox mostly managed to stay under the radar from hackers before April of 2005. Since that time, new exploits are being released almost on a monthly basis.
Despite the facts, many continue to push Firefox based on its supposed security benefits over IE. Even Todd Cochrane, host of the Geek News Central blog and podcast, routinely exhorts his readers/listeners to make the switch in order to better protect their PCs. One lesson to learn from this is that buzz marketing, while powerful and effective, can be just as deceptive as traditional marketing.
But I’ll continue to use Firefox for now anyway, mainly because I love tabbed browsing. When IE7 is released, though, Firefox may become a thing of the past for me.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
