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Originally Posted by Matth
All bugs are not created equal, either, nor do they have equal effect - critical code should be subject to much greater testing and review than areas where a "bug" may be more noticeable (eg. a menu option missing/malfunctioning) but less crucial in the wider scale of things - Microsoft do not seem to be very proactive in searching for vulnerablities, or the initial quality of code left a lot to be desired.
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I agree. Also the software architecture is key to reducing the number of security related bugs. Microsoft's problem, particularly with IE is that it starts from the premise that it's code is trusted and therefore has full access to everything & then has to provide security at every interface. A more sensible approach is to have the operating system kernel provide a finer degree of rights access to individual non-kernel OS modules. This would make buffer overruns less of a security issue (except in the kernel itself) In this regard NT 3.51 was better than NT4. The problem was that all this extra OS based security slowed the computer down too much, so in NT4, the graphics drivers were elevated to have full hardware access. This specific case is an example of the more general problem throughout windows.
I believe that the next step MS will be taking will be to remove write access to pages that are supposed to only contain program code. This should help a bit.