Choosing the right browser for you involves weighing a ton a factors. Aside from just what features you want, you've got to consider speed, what system resources are required, and what level of support's available. One of the most important factors to weigh is how stable the browser is. Besides just crashing your system and causing you to lose work, bugs can be avenues hackers take to plant malware on your system. Looking at the stats from the major players over the past year, although Firefox reported far and away the most bugs, it was also often that fastest to push out fixes for them.

While Microsoft, Apple, and Opera reported only a few dozen bugs over the course of the year (Google's Chrome was not included in the tabulation), Mozilla revealed almost 120 in Firefox, according to the study done by vulnerability researchers at Secunia. Comparing the two main browser competitors, Internet Explorer and Firefox, IE bugs tended to go unfixed for much longer. Secunia looked at cases where bugs were publicly known before a patch was available. While Mozilla patched Firefox in as little as 15 days, taking 86 at the longest, Microsoft's fastest turn-around time was 78 days. Of the six bugs in this category reported for IE last year, half of them still haven't been patched, 200 to 300 days later.

To be fair, of those bugs Microsoft has yet to patch, two are considered to pose a low threat, and one none at all. Still, you'd think that a company would want to patch even a small vulnerability as soon as prudent, presumably at least within a year. Firefox has the benefit that, once a bug is publicized, you can be pretty sure that someone's going to get around to fixing it, as its open-source nature lets non-employees edit the code. Even if you're a skilled programmer, and you're aware of a vulnerability in IE, you're out of luck until Microsoft decides to implement a fix itself. So, despite the large number of reported bugs, the speed at which the Mozilla community puts out fixes makes it seem like the security winner in our book.

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