Firefox less secure than Internet Explorer?

Symantec raises the question with its report that Firefox has more vulnerabilities than IE.

According to the report, in the first half of 2005 Firefox had 25 vulnerabilities confirmed by Mozilla. Meanwhile IE had only 13.

But this is no news to those who read me; I’ve been talking about Firefox’s vulnerabilities for a while.

Consider the following:

The figures reported by Symantec are the vulnerabilities acknowledged by the vendors (Mozilla and Microsoft). We know nothing about the unacknowledged vulnerabilities. There is clearly a stronger tendency to attack Internet Explorer, but that tendency will shift over time as Firefox becomes more popular. The problem is that programmers don’t treat security as a priority.