21 months later, Vista is still more secure than XP

Last October, roughly one year after the release to manufacturing of Windows Vista, I did a comparison of how well Windows Vista was living up to its promise of being more secure than its predecessor, Windows XP (see “One year later, Vista really is more secure”). My data source was the Microsoft Security Bulletin Search page, where I tallied up security bulletins rated Critical or Important for the two Windows versions. The result? Vista had an overwhelming edge over XP, with a mere 14 security updates compared to 41 for XP with Service Pack 2 during the same period. Has Vista maintained its security edge in the succeeding nine months? The answer, it turns out, is yes, although the margin has narrowed. I repeated that previous experiment using data from November 2007 through July 2008. The totals are as follows (in both... [read full story]