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Nope. If the trustworthiness of all browsers was zero, people would do their banking in person. You're trying to get away with arguing only the relative and not

• dkarl 16y ago
  Security is relative and depends on your particular goals. I may have zero confidence that the government has not subverted Firefox, but that would not stop me from using it. If there are government back doors in Firefox, they aren't being exploited on a large scale for robbery or identity theft, and that makes it good enough for online banking. It wouldn't make Firefox good enough for evading government surveillance, but depending on your purposes, using a web browser you don't trust might be better than not using a web browser at all. If someone of sufficient expertise decides to hack you and take your banking info, they will, just like if someone decides to rob you on the street, they will. We assume there are vulnerabilities in any piece of software as big as Firefox. Your security depends on not being a particularly tempting individual target for highly skilled attackers and staying up-to-date enough to avoid mass automated attacks, and those factors depend on relative risks that can't even be objectively measured. Edit/PS: I am also confident that the government would not insert back doors that are likely to be found by criminals, because those vulnerabilities would be exploited by foreign governments and would hurt U.S. commercial interests, which I imagine is the only kind of mistake that would result in Congress taking drastic punitive action (slashing budgets, reducing autonomy, increasing oversight) towards an intelligence agency.