There’s a hole in my browser, dear Liza, dear Liza
…there’s a hole in my browser, dear Liza, a hole.
Or at least there would be if I didn’t update it regularly with security patches.
More than 83% of Firefox users were using the latest, most secure browser version, compared to 65% of Safari users, 56% of Opera users and 47% of Internet Explorer users…”Failure to apply patches promptly or missing them entirely is a recipe for disaster,” the report said. BBC News
It doesn’t matter which browser you are using, if you don’t check for updates to it regularly, if you don’t have up-to-date anti-virus / firewalls installed, your PC is likely to be vulnerable to attack.
It doesn’t matter if you only visit “nice” sites: even nice sites can be compromised and injected with malicious code (although the risk exposure can be reduced by using plugins such as the noscript plugin for Firefox, which will allow you to enable/disable javascript for sites on a case by case basis, so even if a site is compromised with a link to malicious javascript, noscript will prevent that javscript from executing unless you have explicitly trusted the domain it is hosted on).
Keep your browser up to date. Keep your anti-virus and firewalls up to date. Keep secure. Basically, just be paranoid. If you are online, someone is out to get you…
Hello. I am 
So true but I am in two minds about this right now. Just this last Wednesday I lost my Internet connection because of a Windows update that did something it should not have. Solving the problem only took 40 minutes but finding it took 30 hours. I started displaying all sorts of withdrawal symptoms because I had no access to the Net.
I know of one very large local authorty which is still using IE6, and prohibits IE7, by policy…
@Andy: I suspect there is more than one…