Entomology is one of my passions, but I take a different view of bugs than Microsoft—and not just by kind. The company is once again counting security bugs, and possibly to a fault.
There are some things you count and compare, and some things you don't.

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Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get.

"If you believe Jeff Jones, Microsoft's security strategy director, then Vista is much more secure than XP, Mac OS X, and Linux."

Boasting over 6,800,000 downloads and counting, this add-on creates a full featured FTP client within Firefox that rivals standalone applications such as Filezilla or SmartFTP. This add-on is maintained regularly, with a few critical bug fixes released just last week.

Jeffrey Jones, a researcher and the Security Strategy Director at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, recently posted a report [in which] Jones came to the conclusion that, contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer has experienced fewer security vulnerabilities than Firefox over the same periods of time.

One of the things I’ve always liked about using Linux is the feeling that my input is actually important. Either by way of giving input to the developers directly or (more importantly) reporting bugs that inevitably appear on a system. It’s the latter of the two that help Linux. But to the new user, these bugs are nothing more than a nuisance, getting in the way of things “just working”.

A noted security researcher disclosed four new zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft and Mozilla's browsers, including a critical flaw in Internet Explorer (IE) and a major bug in Firefox.

The object of this post is to make you think about ways we could improve each one. I’ll try to link to bugs where there are bugs, but a lot of these are quite new design decisions only present in 10.04 and hence don’t have bugs filed.