Is Firefox really that much more secure?

True enough, but that does not make all browsers equal. There are degrees of security and some browsers are much more secure than others.

The implication (of a statement like "No browser is 100% secure") is that everything is equal by virtue of the true statement that "nothing is perfect".

Think about this: No one lives forever...... also true. But that does not mean that living a full happy life and dying peacefully in bed at 92 is same as dying young of a horrible disease or accident.

Security is death. As soon as you're born, you're dead. Anything else is denial.

I disagree. Even death is uncertain. Up till now, nobody we know of has done away with death, but that doesn't make it certain that nobody ever will. It's just highly probable that everybody dies.

The article is not all that bad though. At the end it makes up the negative beginning by stating that Firefox receives more open scrutiny than IE. It also says Firefox as a stand-alone browser is a better design than the IE/NT-Kernel chimera:

People who don't get security often say that if Firefox or any other open-source software were only as popular as IE, their security would be just as bad. Nope. Wrong.

First, open-source software is constantly being looked at by numerous developers. When problems are found, and they are all the time, they're quickly fixed. With Microsoft code, you have to trust that its programmers are on the ball and that they'll fix problems quickly. You look at their track record and you decide if that's true.

Second, on Windows, open-source applications are just that: applications. Microsoft programs, by their very nature, are tied directly into the operating system kernel. This means, IE—and other Microsoft Windows applications such as Outlook—enables any security hole to potentially rip open the entire operating system.

r_a_trip, Very true, and that's what makes Windows such a sucky, insecure platform. Their alleged "improvements" in security are great at inconveniencing users and taking away what little control they have, while doing nothing to correct windows' fundamentally flawed architecture, which can be summed up as "eight-lane highway into the guts of the operating system for any random code that wishes to execute itself."