BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Mozilla Firefox users are most secure on the Internet, according to a new web study appeared in media reported on Thursday.

    The study, "Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the insecurity iceberg," was a collaborative effort by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM Internet Security Services.

    Altogether, the study found that failure to update browsers exponentially increased the chance for remote attacks executed by hackers, but some 60 percent (59.1) of people used up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers.

    Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day.

    Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Less than half of IE users -- 47.6 percent -- were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.

    The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available.

    Opera ranked slightly higher than IE, with about 56 percent of users who said that they had applied the latest version of the browser to their computer.

    Of the four browsers surveyed, Firefox has captured 227 million users and IE has 1.1 billion so far, encompassing 16.1 percent and 78.3 percent of the market respectively. Safari has 48 million users, and Opera ranks the last in popularity with 11 million.

    (Agencies)