A comparative Study of the Safety between Internet Explorer and Firefox

Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FX) are two major web browsers today. The safety level of IE and FX is consequently a great concern. In this work, we tried to find out and explain the statistic trend of the vulnerabilities of IE and FX and analyzed the safety level of IE and FX. We not only focused on the total sum of vulnerabilities of each browser, but also studied the browsers' vulnerabilities from a new angle: To study the vulnerability relations between different versions of the browsers. We developed two methods to count the vulnerabilities. One is to ignore the version difference, and another is to take version difference into consideration. We found that FX had many more minor versions than IE and consequently many more vulnerabilities than IE. The vulnerability of both FX and IE increased linearly with time and the increasing rate of FX surpassed that of IE when considering the version difference. Besides, we analyzed the intersections of vulnerabilities between different versions of FX and IE and gave a qualitative relation that could be used to predict the vulnerability trend of FX and IE.