Commentary — Even with increased popularity, reports ZDNet, the Firefox Web browser won't face as many security problems as Internet Explorer.

Or so believes Mitchell Baker, the president of the Mozilla Foundation.

What are the odds that Mozilla is any more secure than IE?

• IE has scripting and Java… Firefox too.
• IE based network applications (HTA) can access local resources from the browser… Firefox based applications (XUL + XPCom) can do so as well
• IE supports ActiveX… Firefox supports XPI, which is very much equivalent
• IE rejects improperly signed ActiveX by default, whereas Firefox accepts improperly signed XPI by default
• You'll download IE from microsoft.com, whereas you'll download Firefox from an untrusted domain if you go to mozilla.org

Frankly, despite Internet Explorer's bad reputation, I would suggest that Firefox security hype is like Linux security hype. Microsoft poured millions into securing its solutions. Yet, Microsoft bashing is so common that observers become blind to a straightforward fact: Microsoft isn't playing catch up with Linux; it is playing slap Linux around with a large trout.

Mitchell Baker's statement is laughable.