Opera - the safest and fastest browser on earth - an insiders view from the outside

Opera - the safest and fastest browser on earth

Tuesday, 11. January 2005, 13:20:03

Security

Security issues in modern web browsers:

Opera:
actually 2 of the issues listed as unpatched are patched in Opera 8 Beta, so only 3% should be red

Firefox:

Internet Explorer:

Safari:

So Opera is the most secure browser!

Speed

Mark Wilton-Jones - AKA Tarquin tested how fast (or slow) modern web browsers load websites.
He tested different aspects, for example script speed, loading images and start speed.

Here are his results: <http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html>

Overall Opera was the fastest browser in many of his tests and as a general conclusion you can say: Opera is the fastest browser on earth!

tweakable new features in Opera Beta 2Netscape 8 demo skin

Comments

Nice to know, but as you pointed out with the 2 unpatched issues of Opera, how reliable are the other stats?
I dont know if this is a good comparison: there are minor and major security issues so they have to be weighed somehow. One thing is for sure: Opera takes security serious considering the percentage of patched issues.

By baggeroli, # 11. January 2005, 13:20:03

This reminds me of my own Journal post lately, called 'How to lie with statistics'...
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/journal/40

The pie charts are rather useless, because they don't use the same base. For Firefox 1.0 they started counting only in November 2004, the chart is based on a total of 5 advisories. The things that really matter are harder to catch in a graph:

number of currently open vulnerabilities

severity of the vulnerabilities

average speed of repair by browser vendors

willingness of security researchers to tell vendors before going public with found issues

likelihood of browser being actually targeted with malicious intent (depends on market share)

likelihood of vulnerabilities being found and exploited by crooks: zero-day exploits

By Rijk, # 11. January 2005, 13:20:03

Opera 7.x had 31 advisories, almost half of IE. Both FireFox and Safari had less than 12. Someone could say Opera is almost as insecure as Explorer.

Firefox has born some weeks ago, Opera 7 has born lots of months ago. So, we simply can't compare the number of security flaws of them.

Finally, your "statistic" has only one source. You should have added all info from all security sites available.

By CrazyTerabyte, # 11. January 2005, 13:20:03