Never let it be said that the digitari don’t have their own sacred cows. In teh interweb, some topics are simply common knowledge. No need to roll for it; everyone knows it’s true. For instance: Mac versus PC, or Firefox versus IE.
Late last year a security strategy director for Microsoft named Jeff Jones published a report that counted the number of reported vulnerabilities in IE versus Firefox and came up with a surprising result. I hope he was wearing gloves. If you read a few of the comments, you can feel the moral outrage ooze from the page. Firefox folks fired back.
I find it funny that more than six months earlier he spent an entire post talking about how his employment with Microsoft would affect people’s perception of his bias.
If you are relatively fireproof, read some of the comments (the best ones are from “anonymous”, of course) below each post. Try to set aside your own browser prejudices for a few minutes and just observe how strongly the commentors react. Maybe the study is flawed, maybe it isn’t. Before you jump on to comment about how flawed the “research” is, I require that you download the full report and read his methodology. I’m not interested in uninformed opinions. I have enough of my own. Actually, I don’t even care for your informed opinions. This post isn’t about which browser is better. It’s about how we acquire conventional wisdom and what we do when it’s threatened.
Microsoft really is in a no-win situation. When it comes to security, the conventional wisdom is that IE and the Microsoft OS are less secure than [insert any browser/OS here]. When someone tries their hand at tipping those sacred cows, the push-back is almost staggering. The very suggestion that the bovines in question might be flawed is treated as heresy. Manners go out the window and the “discussion” devolves one step above name-calling. Have you ever experienced or witnessed something similar with another piece of “common knowledge”? What happened?
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