On Tuesday, a web browser-oriented study was released. According to the information it made available, it seems Mozilla Firefox users enjoy the highest degree of protection.

The study, called Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the insecurity iceberg, was put together by The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, IBM Internet Security Services and Google people.

As found in the study’s results, 59.1 percent of people use well updated browsers; this significantly lowers the chances of remote hacker attacks. More than 600 million users were found to be keeping their machines vulnerable to attacks by not upgrading to the latest versions of the browsers they were using.

According to a Net Applications Inc. statement issued about one week ago, Mozilla Corp.'s browser has gained market share since its Firefox 3.0 version was launched on June 17. Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications Inc. executive vice president of marketing, said that at the end of that week, Firefox totaled 19.17%, which was 0.76% more than May’s results showed.

At the same time, Microsoft Corp.'s IE went down by 0.8% (in May it had 72.95%) and Apple Inc.'s Safari by 0.1%. By the end of 2008, some analysts expect Firefox to reach a 30 percent market share.

Given the results of the aforementioned study, there is a good chance that others will be encouraged to start using Mozilla’s software. Firefox 3 can now be found in the Guiness Book of World Records, under the most downloaded software in 24 hours section.