Microsoft has released its round of April patches, some of which include critical Internet Explorer fixes. You may be thinking “great, it is nice to know that they are fixing problems” but do you know how long some of these problems exist before they get fixed?
About two months ago the Washington Post released an article comparing how long it took Microsoft and Mozilla to release patches for their browsers. Last year Mozilla averaged 21 days to release a patch and Microsoft, well, I probably shouldn’t even mention it…135 days. The ironic thing is that Microsoft has 85% of the market share, and 70% of last year Microsoft had KNOWN vulnerabilities in their browser that had not been fixed. Firefox had open vulnerabilities for only 5% of last year!
So why does it take so long for Microsoft to patch their software? I believe that it is because they are focused on getting NEW software out instead of updating the old software. They want to impress the common user and, sadly, the common user does not know about these security issues. Microsoft pushes for users to enable the “Automatic Updates” and is it really for the user’s convenience or is it to make Microsoft look better? When Automatic Updates are enabled the user hardly even knows when the computer is updated since it is all done in the background, and then the user never even thinks their software needs or gets updates.
It is good to see Microsoft updating their software, but I believe that it should be done on a more regular basis. Heck, maybe they need to use the IE7 team to fix IE6 first!
News Source: SlashDot
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Tags: Software
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