Internet Explorer 10 beats both Google’s Chrome and Firefox when it comes to blocking malware downloads, according to analysts NSS Labs. The company's tests using 754 samples of real-world infected links found that Microsoft’s browser was far ahead of its competitors.
The tests found that Internet Explorer 10 offered a mean malware block rate of 99.96%, with Chrome in second with a mean block rate of 83.16%.
“Safari and Firefox, with mean malware block rates of 10.15% and 9.92% respectively, provided negligible protection but were still more than five times more effective than Opera, which blocked only 1.87% of the malware in this test,” said the company in its report.
The tests were conducted over a period of 28 days, with 550 “test runs” per browser against URLs containing malware, according to NSS Labs. The products under test were Apple Safari 5, Google Chrome 25/26, Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, Mozilla Firefox 19 and Opera 12.
“As the first line of defense against malware infection, browsers must provide a strong layer of protection,” the company says. “NSS tested the effectiveness of five leading web browsers against 754 samples of real-world malicious software, and the results show significantly differing protection capabilities.”
“For every ten web encounters with socially engineered malware, Firefox and Safari users will be protected from approximately one attack. Nine out of ten browser malware encounters will test the defenses of installed anti-virus or other operating system defenses,” the report says. "By contrast, Chrome users will be protected from eight out of ten such attacks, and Internet Explorer 10 users will be protected from all but about 4 out of 1,000 socially engineered malware attacks.”
