New Study Shows That IE 10 Blocks Almost All Malware On Windows 8

The never-ending battle between the web browsers of the world continues. This time the theater of war is a new study conducted by security research firm NSS Labs.

The firm tested the latest versions of five of the top browsers in the world — Internet Explorer 10, Chrome 25 and 26, Safari 5, Firefox 19 and Opera 12 — for a total of 28 days in order to determine which one blocked the largest amount of malicious malware.

All the browsers have been tested around 18,000 times in order to find out whether they managed to block all malicious URLS on computers running Windows 8:

“An initial sample set of 11,296 unique and suspicious URLs entered the system; 754 URLs were found active and malicious, and met the criteria for entry into the test. In total, 550 test runs were performed by the five browsers against these unique 754 URLs – resulting in over 18,000 test cases per browser.”

Needless to say, the results (available here as a PDF file) speak for themselves.

Internet Explorer 10 took top honors after managing to hold out 99.96 percent of the malware. Google Chrome followed with 83.16 percent. Surprisingly (or not) Safari found itself in third place, but still horribly far behind at 10.15 percent.

Mozilla Firefox (this time very surprisingly) fared slightly worse in this regard, and came next with 9.92 percent. Opera 12 rounded the list, coming in last with a barely noticeable 1.87 percent.

While Internet Explorer 10 may be the most secure browser out in the world according to NSS Labs, the newly released browser is very slowly increasing its market share. Internet Explorer 8 is currently the most popular browser in the world, when the charts are broken down to version numbers.