Brett Glass from ExtremeTech wrote:"Browser Monoculture Sets Stage For Mass Infections."
''Epidemiologists, who study the spread of disease, frequently warn
that a "monoculture" --- a population in which individuals are too
much alike -- is subject to devastating epidemics in which a
pathogen "discovers" a weakness that every member has.
The same is true of computers, especially networked
computers: the more of them run the same buggy
software, the more likely it is that a worm or
virus can use the bug to wreak havoc.
This is why it is so disturbing to read the recent OneStat survey results
which indicate that Microsoft's Internet Explorer, well known for security
holes that allow machines to be taken over if they so much as display
the wrong page, has 95% market share. A scarier statistic still:
of the machines running IE, a large percentage are running
older versions -- the ones with the most holes.
Second to IE is Netscape, which has a market share of a
mere 3%. Mozilla and Opera are both in the 1% range.
Even if the company's statistics have been skewed by browsers and
web proxies which "masquerade" as IE, the fact that a consistently
vulnerable product has such a large market share is cause for great
concern. Unless users and system vendors become more conscious
of the perils of monocultures, the development of a "worm that ate
the Web" is not only a distinct possibility but dangerously likelyhood.''
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 (CK-DJGM-i.net)
