Firefox to US$7,500 cash reward) to researchers who discover severe security holes in Firefox. Official guidelines for handling security vulnerabilities discourage early disclosure of vulnerabilities so as not to give potential attackers an advantage in creating exploits. Because Firefox generally has fewer publicly known security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer (see "Comparison of web browsers"), improved security is often cited as a reason to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. "The Washington Post" reported that exploit code for known critical security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was available for 284 days in 2006. In comparison, exploit code for known, critical security vulnerabilities in
Firefox reliability, security, and standards conformance, finishing substantially ahead of Chrome, the runner-up. "Tom's Hardware" concluded by declaring Firefox the "sound" winner of the performance benchmarks. In January 2014, a benchmark testing the memory usage of Firefox 29, Google Chrome 34, and Internet Explorer 11 indicated that Firefox used the least memory when a substantial number of tabs were open. In benchmark testing in early 2015 on a "high-end" Windows machine, comparing Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, Firefox achieved the highest score on three of the seven tests. Four different Javascript performance tests gave conflicting results. Firefox bested