CritterNYC - 3:45 pm on Jan 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

My impression was that most of the botnet problem was related to the (technnically needless and useless) integration of IE into Windows.

Quite true. A big part of it is the fundamental difference in the way things are approached. Microsoft let the world do anything they wanted to in the browser and has to play catch up to turn off access to each piece that's exploited. IE exposes LOTS of the holes in Windows to the world. Firefox, on the other hand, approaches things from a more security-minded point of view (should we provide access to X?). And, the fact that it doesn't heavily integrate with Windows means it isn't vulnerable to the slew of Windows issues that crop up that IE provides access to.