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Comment by desigooner | Hacker News Reader

so what happens when an exploit other than IE is used in the future when something goes down at Google?

Seems like a decision taken in haste and more of a knee-jerk reaction.

Google is getting in to the OS business. I suspect this is as much about dogfood as security, but hammering on security is instant bad press for Microsoft.

Well Google is also competing with Apple's OS business. The bigger point is that Windows doesn't offer users any advantage over Linux or OS X anymore. Its not like the old days when Windows had the most applications and driver support.

The number of games supported on Windows is much better than for Mac/Linux.

In the context of Google, that is not a criteria.

.. and that is one more reason for corporates to move to Mac/Linux

That's why they're ditching not IE but windows altogether.

Doesn't seem knee-jerk to me when you look at the security track record of the various platforms.

Yes, it does. Recent versions of Windows (Vista and especially 7) have had security track records at least on par with OS X and desktop Linux. Mac OS X hasn't been doing terribly well lately, and Apple is notoriously slow to patch known security flaws, e.g.: http://bit.ly/62bTNQ

I'd provide a link to hard data, but for some reason Secunia's taken down their list of unpatched vulnerabilities in OS X (?!), even though they provide this data for most other operating systems, including Windows.

Sorry, but that simply doesn't matter.

Case in point, OSX even had more security advisories published than windows for a while, yet the "experts" still mostly agree OSX is the safer platform;

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10444561-245.html?tag=rtco...

There's a very simple reason: OSX has around 6% market share, Windows around 80%. Go figure which platform the kids are going to target for the time being. Also feel free to research on which platform the major, semi-automated botnets (Storm, Zeus) are running.

>>which platform the major, semi-automated botnets (Storm, Zeus) are running.

Let me guess - not Windows 7.

It's simple economics as far as the malware/security track record goes. Since windows holds the most marketshare in OS business, most of the effort in terms of malware or virus creation is directed towards windows systems. It's been shown at Pwn2Own that Macs can be easier to break into vs. Windows esp. Vista onwards.

If you were a hacker and you wanted that data, it wouldn't have stopped you if the target used Mac OSX ... you could just target some other unpublicized exploit. I mean all you need is Flash to do some damage.

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