The importance of updates
18 May 2007Secunia just released an interesting study on the update rates of various applications. When it came to browsers they said:
“Comparing browsers and looking at Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, we found out that Firefox 2 is the least vulnerable, as only 5.19% of all Firefox 2 installations miss security updates, whereas 11.96% of all Opera 9.x installations miss security updates, and the numbers for IE6 and IE7 are 9.61% and 5.4% respectively. “
You should always be careful drawing broad conclusions from any one study (e.g. this one has a sample size of 350K). However, this does highlight to me the importance of all the hard work that goes on here to produce security updates. By keeping the update process simple, updates small, and the quality of those releases high we encourage people to take updates.
The speed and quality of updates is one of our best weapons again the advancing state of the art of exploits. Hopefully the teams working on this keep this in mind when they stay up late for another night of RC re-spins 
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