Vista: Most secure OS after 90 days?

Operating systems are kind of like cars in a way: there's no way of knowing how reliable a car is until it's been on the market for a few years and taken a few lumps. Likewise, you can't tell how secure an OS is until it's faced a few threats. Now that Windows Vista has rolled over the 90 day mark on the odometer, Microsoft is trotting out some security comparisons that show Vista in a very favorable light. According to an eight and a half page PDF, Vista fared the best after 90 days, with only five vulnerabilities discovered, followed by Windows XP with 14 and OS X 10.4 with 20. The various flavors of Linux fared especially poorly, take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation's whopping 181 bugs, for example. This is obviously good news for Microsoft and Vista's "improved security," though one has to wonder what other factors might be at play here. As always with this sort of PR fluff, serve with a grain of salt.

For more on Vista security:
- see the full security report (.pdf)

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