The web is not safe these days. With the advancement of hacking culture, more in the darker shades, the already existing viruses and worms being enhanced to be more malicious and new ones getting developed everyday, the web is constantly under vicious attacks. All the spywares, adwares ,Trojans and the botnets are deployed to do what they are meant for, get inside your PC and steal your personal information or corrupt your system. With companies taking steps towards providing safe browsing and downloading, like gmail and yahoo that have a attachment scanner before you can download it, the question arises, “How secure our web browser is?”

The search for the safest web browser available today brought me to a report by NSS Labs, which has been in the forefront of information security since 1991, which clearly states IE 9 as the safest web browser in the globe today. SHOCKING!!! I am a big chrome fan and always thought that either chrome or firefox would be the toughest competitors but the report left me dumbstruck. I am sure most of you reading this article would be logged into Just Info through chrome or firefox right now, because you love the addons with these browsers. But sorry folks, even the plugins and addons could not give IE 8 and 9 the slightest of competition.

In September, 2010, NSS Labs performed the fourth test of their series to check the security level of world’s most popular web browsers today, Microsoft’s IE 9 and IE 8, Google chrome 6, Mozilla firefox 3.6, Apple safari 5 and Opera 10. This tested the browser’s capability to avoid socially engineered malware, the most common and impactful security threat to internet users these days. The Live Testing Methodology generated a report that contained empirically-validated data that has been gathered during 11 days of 24×7 testing with fresh new malware URL’s being added every 6 hours over 39 discrete test runs. The products were updated to their latest versions available at that time.

The graph shows the great variation in the ability of various browsers to handle socially engineered malware. Whereas, IE 8,9 go neck-to-neck, firefox and safari converge as the time passes and new threats are added. Chrome does pretty bad but the worst is the Opera, which refused to budge as if it has no security responsibility. I always thought that Opera mini was a classic mobile web browser but the windows version sucks!!!

The final result looked something like this:

The IE 9 wins with over 99% threats successfully blocked. The IE’s outperform any other rival at this task because of the smart-screen filter that Microsoft’s engineers embedded in them. 

I always thought that Internet Explorer was something bundled freely with windows as a basic requirement made by Microsoft as supporting software. Vendors like Mozilla and Opera dedicated themselves towards creating their browsers and so were meant to be good. But this report shattered it all. They may look good and work great with their addons but when it comes to web security IE surely kicks arse!!!

source: ansblog