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Safari takes lead in patch deployment
Good news and bad news for security-conscious Safari fans: Symantec's latest security report said that the Apple browser was the fastest to-market with security fixes.
Safari took an average of just three days to patch vulnerabilities during the first six months of 2007. Opera needed four days, and both Mozilla and IE were exposed for an average of five days.
Take the news with a grain of salt, though. There are plenty of other figures to bring Safari back down to earth.
For starters, the study noted a five-fold increase in vulnerabilities over the second half last year as well. Most of this can be traced to the flood of attention that came to Safari after Apple ported the browser and placed it at the center of the iPhone.
Apple remains near the bottom when it comes to deployment of OS patches, taking an average of 43 days to patch vulnerabilities, well behind both Red hat and Microsoft. This too would suggest that Apple's newfound diligence in fixing Safari may have more to do with avoiding bad press at a crucial time than a new-found commitment to securtiy.
Over the second half of last year, Apple let the lone publicly disclosed Safari flaw sit for 62 days without being patched (though that is countered by the fact that there has yet to be any malware for OS X found in the wild.)
Still, if you're a Mac/Safari user looking for a counterpoint the next time someone rehashes one of Microsoft's "more secure" reports, this will be a nice little salvo.
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