Dark Reading - Evil Bytes: Alternative Web Browsers: Do They Have A Fighting Chance?

How many Web browsers can you name? Besides the most common -- Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, and Safari -- I know of Google's Chrome, Opera, and some Linux-specific browsers. That's it. So I was interested to read Computerworld's article ("Too good to ignore: 6 alternative browsers,") which gives a good overview of six alternative browsers (really five if you don't count separate PC and Mac versions of Opera). Still, while it's cool to know there are so many options out there for browsing the Web, I'm left wondering: How secure are these other offerings?

by John Sawyer
Dec 3, 2008

When you're using one of the "Big 3" browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari), you know they're being used by millions of people daily and have undergone considerable scrutiny by their respective vendors. Also, security researchers are looking closely at them because they know those are the popular browsers that would cause the most damage if they were exploitable. This is a similar argument as to why hardly any malware exists for Mac OS X compared with Windows. Market share.

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