(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
I have been wanting to weblog about a particularly interesting news article that a while ago appeared in CNET: A safe browser? No longer in the lexicon where it puts together an interesting overview of why most web browsers out there are all vulnerable more or less to idle hands getting busy with them attacking their vulnerabilities.
Funny part of that interesting reading, to say the least, is that throughout the whole article browsers like IE, Safari and FireFox get commented on their potential security risks. However, Opera was not mentioned at all. Strange, right ? I guess I wasn’t the only one surprised to read about that because if you take a good look into the different comments quite a few folks have also indicated why was Opera left behind when all of us know that it is one of the most secure web browsers around.
I am not going to comment on the fact if this has been done on purpose or not, or if the author of the article didn’t think that Opera had enough user audience to be able to make it, I am just going to mentioned that, like one of the comments states, Secunia has got the perfect statement to bring into the table that will show end-users which browser is just state of the art as far as security is concerned:
“The Secunia database currently contains 0 Secunia advisories marked as “Unpatched”, which affects Opera 8.x.“
People can go now and say that idle hands do not focus on a browser whose market share is not good enough and to that I would say, that is fine, no problem. Opera users do not really care too much about statistics. What we do care for, though, is that we have a secure and reliable web browser we can use all the time in order to continue enjoying our own web experience. And people like the folks at Secunia do realise how important this is and despite those market share figures they still include reports on Opera on a regular basis indicating any security flaws it may have. And so far, like in previous occasions, they prove over and over again which one is the safest browser so far, and therefore still part of our lexicon.
The folks at Secunia are actually the ones that put most effort in finding holes in Opera lately. The issues they do find, however, are properly communicated to Opera, and Secunia is not in a hurry to get publicity for them, so we get the time to implement a proper fix.
(note: I work for Opera)
Hello Rijk and welcome to elsua! Thanks very much for your feedback comments and for the insights. Indeed, although I created this weblog post a few weeks back in my other weblog I decided to migrate it over here more than anything else to show Opera’s commitment towards improving the web browser whenever there is a new security risk coming out. And I must say that every time I have been more than pleased to find out that just as the security risk may come out you folks have already been working on the solution to the problem and therefore a new release is made available within hours ! That is just terrific ! That is just the level of commitment and involvement that we, Opera lovers, like so much about this web browser. Few others could compare with it and that is also one of the many reasons why I am still using Opera as my default web browser at both of my computers.
Again, thanks a lot for the feedback and for dropping by ! Appreciated.