John Pescatore

uTest released the results of their Bug Battle where they had 1,330 testers pound on the beta releases of the three major browsers: Microsoft IE8, Google Chrome,  and Mozilla Firefox 3.1. Not surprisingly, Google Chrome was the buggiest – almost 50% more bugs than they found in Firefox, even though more testers were banging on Firefox. Now, there may be some bias here – the testers also scored Chrome lowest in usability and last in their preference in what browser they would use (Firefox was by far their preferred browser.)

This comes on the heels of Google announcing their “Native Client” initiative, which Lydia Leong of Gartner discusses here.  That idea has huge security implications - Google is basically saying they will use static analysis to determine if code is vulnerable/dangerous and then make decisions if the app is trying to do something unsafe. If it isn’t, let it run. If it is dangerous, don’t allow it to run *or* potentially apply some security policy.  Of course, this all hinges on being able to quickly analyse the code for vulnerability or dangerous intent…

Now, if they really had such great capabilities in this type of code analysis, why so many serious bugs in Chrome and the other Google software?

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