Users of Safari and Opera more vulnerable to cyberattacks

The report, prepared by researchers at Google Switzerland and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology showed that users of Safari and Opera are much more likely to run insecure versions of those browsers. 

Analysis of data pulled from anonymized Google logs showed that 24 percent of Opera users were browsing with the latest version three weeks after a new release. On the other hand, the users of Apple's Safari on a 3.x version of Safari having applied a new update within the same time after the release made 53 percent. Thomas Duebendorfer and Stefan Frei, authors of the report stated this would give to attackers "plenty of time to use known exploits to attack users of outdated browsers."

Moreover, the report compared above mentioned browsers to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which had 97 percent and 85 percent of users running the most current browser respectively. Microsoft's Internet Explorer was excluded from the research due to its user-agent string not revealing incremental versions numbers.

The report concluded by saying the main reason to these differences were the ways the browsers updated. Both Chrome and Firefox offer updates automatically, whereas, Apple and Opera don't. 3.2 version of Safari on a Mac requires Tiger or Leopard operating system update first before getting browser updates, and Opera users have to go through a fresh installation each time they want to update their browsers.