Which is safer, Internet explorer or mozilla firefox, and why?

Firefox is safer than Internet Exploder, no doubt about that. But Opera is even safer, and certainly faster than both. You might give it a try. www.opera.com

Internet Explorer seems to get infected very easily. Firefox is a lot better. I've had the best experience with Netscape, though. It lacks some features, I've never had a problem with it as far as spyware and viruses.

Firefox is the most secure because it has many dedicated people working on it from all over the world and anyone which the necessary skill can fix the bugs in it, and their patch will be accepted. Unlike Internet Explorer which is just run by the small group of people at Microsoft. Also Microsoft has no real incentive to make their browser the best because they know that many people will use it anyway. It comes preinstalled with Windows and most average users don't know enough about this stuff to go and download a new one. Whereas the people at Firefox know that if they screw up, all their users will go elsewhere. Also, when you are trying to come up with a virus or trojan, you know you have more chance of infecting the naive people using IE than the smart people using Firefox, so you will try to find the holes in the software that the dumb people are using. ;)

Firefox is safer tha IE because it has less vulnerabilities and, since it's open source, patches are released faster than patches in IE. Think that in 2006 the exploit code for a vulnerability in IE was available for 284 days (sic!), in comparison the exploit code for a vulnerability in Firefox was available only for 9 days before Mozilla released a patch.........:)

Firefox is definitely safer: it has less security holes (if any). Being an open source program it also has a lot of add-ons and plugins developed by a huge community - and those can make your surfing experience much better! (Lately I am experimenting quite a bit with Opera, it also has several features that I really like.)