The 18-month study, carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, based its conclusions on how often users updated to the most recent version of different browsers.

Acording to the study, titled Understanding the Web Browser Threat, 83.3 per cent of Firefox users had updated to the latest version of Firefox, while only 47.6 per cent of Internet Explorer (IE) users were using fully patched browsers.

Firefox has a self-contained updating mechanism, which means surfers who use it are far more likely to use the most current and safest version of the browser.

"For years the software industry has promoted one security best practice over all others: always use the most recent version of the installed software and instantly apply the latest patches," said the authors of the paper.

However researchers found that IE users were the slowest to upgrade their browsers. Even though IE7 has been around for nearly two years, barely half of IE users had upgraded (52.5 per cent) compared to 92.2 per cent of Firefox users.

The study also shed light on the 'brower wars': IE is still by far the most widely user browser with a global share of 78 per cent, Mozilla's Firefox at 16 per cent, Apple's Safari at 3 per cent and Opera at 0.8 per cent.

How often do you update your browser? Let us know on the Web User forums.

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