"It's not rocket science," said Lars Ewe, Cenzic's chief technology officer. "We used several databases, including the CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) database to count the number of known vulnerabilities."
Johnathan Nightingale, the manager of the Firefox front-end development team, begs to differ however, “The Cenzic report seems to measure security by overall bug count, and we've been pretty vocal about why that's a flawed metric.”
"We've even seen signs lately that Microsoft is coming around on the subject," he said.
The main emphasis of the survey was on Firefox, which had the largest percentage of Web browser vulnerabilities.
Firefox recorded 44 percent vulnerabilities, while Safari’s came to 35 percent, higher than Internet Explorer’s and Opera’s vulnerabilities, which stood at 16 and 6 percent respectively.
Focus should be on browser “security”, not flaws
Lars Ewe blamed the vulnerability of Firefox on its reputation. Safari had vulnerabilities because of its flawed version that runs on Apple’s iPhone.
"Firefox clearly has some a momentum," he said. "When you gain momentum, you're exposed more [to security researchers and hackers]."
"At the end of the day, the number of vulnerabilities is only one measurement of a browser's security," said Ewe. "We're not trying to point a finger at any one browser. I would certainly not abandon Firefox because of this."
Ewe, who uses Firefox for his personal browsing, also said that users should focus more on the browser security and not on its flaws.
Sun Java, PHP, and Apache were the other three firms recording the most vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009.
IE--most used browser
Internet Explorer (IE) is the most used browser followed by Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera.
In spite of all the problems and vulnerabilities in business, browsers are much more secure than what they were two years ago.
"In general, you can make the argument that all browsers have room for improvement," said Ewe. "They have to choose between usability and security, and user-demanded behavior that makes them choose usability over security. That being said, all are trying to be better."
Firefox, which has an estimated 330 million users, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. It was launched on Nov. 9, 2004.
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