Which browser is safest in 2013

Posted by Aamir khan

NSSLabs recently conducted a test in which the five leading browsing programs

Apple Safari,
Google Chrome,
Microsoft Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox and Opera
had to demonstrate their ability to protect against socially engineered malware downloads.

A total of 754 real cyberthreats were used in this comparison. All five browsers were subjected to 550 test runs against these 754 unique malware URLs, resulting in over 18,000 test cases per browser.

Fig. 1. Source: NSSLabs

Figure1 shows that Microsoft and Google are ahead of Apple, Mozilla, and Opera in terms of built-‐in download security protection; however, further analysis is necessary to explain adequately the difference in 99.96% and 83.16% protection rates between Internet Explorer and Chrome. These differences in protection are far from linear.

See the Complete test as PDF.