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 3.5 Net Applications, respectively. Due to the January 2010, well-publicized vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, the German, French, and Australian governments had publicly issued warnings to Internet Explorer users to use alternative browsers, at least until a fix for the security hole was made. The first browser they recommended was Mozilla Firefox, followed by Google Chrome. Even before the release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17, 2008, Firefox 3.1 was in development under the codename "Shiretoko". It was planned to include new interface features such as tab previews, tag auto-completion, HTML 5 <video> tag support, and CSS text shadows. The