OSNews

Let's put it this way : while technical merits can be debated in much details, a much simpler observation to make is that Windows powers more than 90% of the world's desktops and laptops.

If some piece of software has such a large market share, unless it is built with supernatural attention to security concerns, it will always be broken by crackers at a much faster rate than flaws are fixed, and therefore should not be used by people who are worried about the security of their computers.

Can we agree on that ?

Edited 2012-09-26 14:21 UTC

Yes, we can.

But this only makes the other platforms, ignored platforms, not more secure.

See what is happening to Mac OS X, now that it has a user base big enough to attract attention.

Or how easy it is to hack certain Android mobile phones.

And let's not forget if the operating system does not make use of proper sandboxing, an owned process will have all the rights as the user account it runs under.

This is enough to make your "My Documents", $HOME, /Users/username visible to the world.

We will only get more secure OS, when the mainstream OS finally adopt microkernel architectures, with enforced sandboxing for all applications.

Additionally moving away from C to more strong typed languages without buffer overflows by design, would help reducing the amount of attack vectors.

Of course, once you car manipulate assembly, the language used to compile the code does not matter that much. So my last remark can be compensated by making static analysis tools part of the standard compiler toolchain.