Gmail compromised - is Google the next Microsoft?

It's being reported across the internet and the blogosphere that the popular GMail service has hit it's first security issue. I read the report here. I enjoyed that report because it had a pretty good description of the vulnerability, how an account may become compromised, and what the fix is.

I've read a lot of comments that Google is the next Microsoft when it comes to security issues. It isn't as if either Google or Microsoft's products are particularly vulnerable, but that they are leaders in their respective industries and garner the most attention from hackers. It's actually pretty amazing that Gmail went this long without a serious security breach, and goes to show how much more difficult an online application is to compromise.

In the long run, the webcentric nature of applications like Gmail will help to keep them more secure than desktop applications (like Microsoft's Outlook for example). Since the applications are stored, operate, and communicate from centralized servers, it's far easier to patch than the hundreds of millions of personal computers which each have to download the patch. Personally, I trust a dozen Google engineers over millions of clueless end-users when faced with a security issue.

There's a lot of hoopla about this, but I can guarantee that not much will come of it.