Security of mozila firefox

Mozilla Firefox has much better security. Firefox does not support Activex which is a tool that can be used with good and bad intentions. Activex allows web sites to have more access to Windows. As a result of this, cyber criminals have taken advantage of it. This means that viruses and spyware (and sometimes other types of malware as well such as adaware) can take advantage of it, resulting in these programs ending up on the visitors computer (if using Windows at the time). Spyware is any piece of software that silently gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.

Spyware and other types of Malware usually do not target Firefox, but there is some out there that will also get Firefox, but it is rather unlikely that a Firefox user would get it. Unless for example they install loads of extensions from all kinds of web sites.

If a Firefox user has the cache turned on a Trojan can end up in it. A cache is an amount of space in which Firefox uses to temporarily store images and other files from sites so you can load the page up quicker if you chose to go back and view the page again. You can turn it off by going to "Tools" then "options" click on the "privacy" tag and then the "cache" tag set the amount of MB's it's allowed to use to "0". However a Trojan just sit their in the catch and will not do anything unless the user actually opens it. If you have a virus scaner (like AVG) it will be able to remove trojans and worms from your computer.

Spyware, viruses, and other things like this are usually only a Windows issue. In fact viruses aren't really an issue with other operating systems such as Linux. Linux is known to be very secure and virus free. However some viruses were made for Linux, but they were never distributed out of the lab. Ubuntu is a popular and rather good Linux distribution for beginners. It is worth checking out and especially if you have had enough of Windows and it's many problems such as it's very bad security. Linux is very stable and does not just crash like Windows does for some users. (Personally my PC never crashes, but I've had some problems before.)

With popular free open source programs such as Firefox, or Linux distributions. Any security issues are fixed very quickly. Unlike for example a software company like Microsoft were it can take years before a security issue has been fixed. That is of course if it ever gets fixed!