IE8 whips rivals in blocking malware sites

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 8 again trounced rival browsers in a test of their malware-blocking abilities, catching 81% of attack-code-infected sites, according to a testing company.

IE8's skills at sniffing out malware sites improved by 17% since March, said Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, the firm that conducted the benchmarks. The testing was sponsored by Microsoft's security team.

IE8's improvement, and its dominance over competitors, could make some users reconsider decisions to abandon Microsoft's browser for one of its challengers. "Should people rethink that decision?" Moy asked. "By [this] data, absolutely."

While IE8 blocked eight of 10 of the malware-distributing sites that NSS included in its 12-day test, the nearest competitor, Mozilla's Firefox 3.0, caught just 27% of the same sites. Apple's Safari 4.0 and Google's Chrome 2.0, meanwhile, blocked only 21% and 7% of the sites, respectively. Opera Software's browser properly identified only 1%.

:story: Full story: Computerworld