Internet Explorer 8 released; is it really safer than other browsers?
Along with the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, a report by research firm NSS was presented that shows the new version of Internet Explorer is better at protecting users from malware. The (Microsoft-sponsored) study looked at the blacklist features of all modern browsers, using real malware URL’s, over a period of several days. The most important conclusion was that the SmartScreen filter in IE8 appears to offer the best protection, blocking over half the malware URL’s within a day.
The report shows some interesting things; Firefox fans will be quick to point out that the average time needed for a URL to be blocked was only 6 hours for Firefox, and nearly double that time (11.7 hours) for Internet Explorer. Another thing that struck me was the huge difference between Firefox, Safari and Chrome:
Since all three browsers use Google’s Safe Browsing as the main component of their phishing filters, this difference came as a surprise to me. Even more so if you look at the drop in Chrome’s detection rate; this would appear to suggest a problem with the database used at the time of testing. There is also some some language in the report that suggests the malware URL’s were not chosen in a completely random fashion:
Sample sets contain malicious URLs distributed via: SPAM, Social networks, and malicious websites. Exploits containing malware payloads (exploits + malware) a.k.a. “clickjjacking” or “drive-by downloads” were excluded from the test.
I’m already looking forward to the next round of tests; if the Smartscreen technology really turns out to be as effective as the NSS report says it is, I strongly urge Microsoft to share it with other browser makers. After all, Microsoft is free to use the Safe Browsing filters as well, and anything that can be done to make the web safer is a good thing.
January 27th, 2010 at 11:14 am
Here is something worth mentioning that I want to share. I have been doing tests with IE8 verses Firefox for a few months now in XP. What I do is run with out any anti-virus what so ever. I then hop around to different sites reading etc. I use firefox about 50% of the time and the other 50% I use IE8. I’ve had Firefox allow my computer to get infected 2 times in the last 6 months. It’s a thing that says it’s scanning my hard drive because it’s infected. OF course when I see this, I restore the entire hard drive with Acronis. It takes me about 7 minutes. I’m all set up with a backup and know what I’m doing etc..
However, all this time has gone by and I’ve never had anything infect windows while running IE8, Internet explorer 8. NEVER! Not even once! Zero! I hate to say it but I’m kind of impressed. And so far I’ve not seen one virus under windows 7 I’m also testing. However that includes firefox as well. But my point is under XP, I got malware through firefox several times.
Also I noticed that on rare occasion some web sites with buggy flash animations would try to crash IE8. But it never crashes. Instead I saw only one tab disappear and then it quickly said something like “reloading your tab”. And it came back. I heard a long time ago that they were making IE8 multi threaded so that instead of crashing, it tends to just get rid of the offending task.
So my conclusion is that IE8 might actually be better than FireFox. Good luck getting people to admit that though….
January 27th, 2010 at 11:16 am
I want to add that the infections with firefox go back a ways and I can’t be sure of the exact amount of time, but I was infected more than twice. It could be 3 or 4 times. Point is, never any problems with IE8. And never under windows 7. I’m not saying it’s malware proof. No way. But the fact that it can get that far is quite impressive.