A new study now crowns Internet Explorer 9 as the most secure browser

Despite the information from a few days ago about a major vulnerability in Internet Explorer, now a new study published by NSS Labs brings best news to the IE team. According to this study, Internet Explorer 9 is by far the best browser at blocking malware and protecting against all types of Internet fraud. In the comparison, carried out between December 2011 and May 2012, the Microsoft browser has far surpassed its main competitors: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.

To conduct the research, NSS Labs tested IE9, Chrome from version 15 to 19, Firefox from version 7 to 13, and Safari 5 ; all of them running in similar virtual machines with Windows 7 as operating system. Each browser was permanently updated to its latest version while undergoing testing. Throughout them each one of them investigated more than 750,000 cases to verify multiple forms of malware, bank fraud, password theft, impersonation or click fraud .

After the study period the results were very favorable to the Windows browser. Internet Explorer 9 managed to block around 95% of malicious activity, tripling the number of blocks Chrome had, which it did in 33% of cases , and leaving Firefox and Safari in evidence, unable to block even 6% of attacks.The difference is bloody in the case of fraudulent clicks, where IE9 is still above 90% blocks while its rivals were barely able to block 1%.

Can such a difference be real? Well, the company that carried out the study, NSS Labs, seems to have received funding from Microsoft for its research on other occasions, although in this case ensures that his work is completely independent and without sponsorship of the computer giant. Just in case I leave you links to the two parts of the study below so that you can draw your own conclusions. The differences are really overwhelming and if true they would be added to other tests that demonstrate the effort that the Redmond people are making trying to improve their browser.

Via | The Next Web More information | NSS Labs Study Part 1, Part 2