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 Firefox's Javascript performance on Kraken and the newer Jetstream tests trailing slightly behind all other tested browsers except Internet Explorer, which performed relatively poorly. On Octane, Firefox came ahead of IE and Safari, but again slightly behind the rest, including Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge. Edge took overall first place on the Jetstream and Octane benchmarks. As of the adoption of Firefox 57 and Mozilla's Quantum project entering production browsers in November 2017, Firefox was tested to be faster than Chrome in independent JavaScript tests, and demonstrated to use less memory with many browser tabs opened. Downloads have continued at an