Undeterred by the response I got last time I praised the security in Vista, I was interested by this story on VNUNET about the vulnerabilities in Vista, XP, Mac OS X, and three Linux Distributions in the 90 days after Vista was released.

Vista does rather well (although curiously XP had fewer unpatched flaws at the end of the period). For me the most worrying figure is the number of unpatched flaws at the end of the period. Mac OS X was pretty much on a par with Vista but Red Hat Linux had 60 and Suse 20.

I often use the website www.secunia.com to check on software. For instance, although I use Firefox and like it, I recognise that at the time of writing there were still five unpatched vulnerabilties, compared to none at all for Opera.

I was particulary amused by the remarks Tom makes about Apple fans: "Researchers, meanwhile, have started to closely track Apple software. This has been sparked by frustration over the firm's arrogant attitude towards outside researchers as well as the refusal by so-called Mac fan boys to acknowledge that Apple software is not bullet-proof." The same often applies to Linux fans (I'm still waiting for links to all the security experts who rubbished the last security report I quoted).

Leaving aside inherent flaws, I've found that Microsoft has a much better attitude towards security over the last few years and feel that credit should be given where due.