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Baroness Vadera, the parliamentary under secretary of state for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) cited Internet Explorer as an example of customers deserting a product because of poor security, whilst giving evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer automatically downloads security updates every 30 days," she claimed. "There's

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an interesting thing going on of a switch to an alternative, Firefox, because it does it every six days and people are beginning to get aware of that."

Baroness Vadera was answering calls from the Lords Committee to make software vendors legally liable for security flaws in their software. And once again, the Government minister took a swipe at Microsoft.

"We need to find a way to raise the bar of expectation from the software industry," she claimed. "In particular, this rush to market - which has decreased famously since the Bill Gates memo [presumably referring to Gates's 2002 memo on trustworthy computing]."

Vadera said discussions were taking place with the EU over software vendor liability, but that "we're not very hopeful this will be taken up."

"It's quite hard to have attribution of liability... because of the way the internet works on layers," she added. "There would be massive interoperability issues. It would also be very difficult to do this on a UK level."