Microsoft Comissioned Report Says IE8 Is The Most Secure Web Browser Available…What’s That Smell?
According to ARS Technica, Microsoft goes out and pays a company named NSS Labs to report on Internet browser security and look what they find. NSS Labs believes that the biggest security risks to a browser are socially engineered malware followed by phishing attempts. So the company tested a range of browsers to see how they handle these threats. At the end, IE8 came out on top followed by Firefox.
Seeing as the tests were paid for by Microsoft, it would be a shock if anything other than IE8 won. But the question is, can you really trust the results? On the surface, the results have to be treated with some amount of suspicion because of who paid for them. I would love to see another party run similar tests to validate or disprove these results.
August 17, 2009 at 11:34 am
Unfortunately, objectivity is hard to find. No organization is going to commit significant resource to such a study without being paid by someone – if it is MS, then the results will be seen as biased towards IE, if it is Apple, or Oracle/Sun then it will be percieved as biased against IE. The only organizations who would do such a study for free would likely be one already deeply behind the open source movement, and hence their results would be biased towards FireFox, etc.
As I say, objectivity is really hard to find in this business.