Study: IE8's SmartScreen leads in malware protection

A recently released NSS Labs study, claims that Internet Explorer 8 greatly outperforms competing browsers in terms of protecting users against web based malware.

According to the study based upon a sample of 492 URLs, not only is IE8's SmartScreen Filter achieving a leading position against the rest of the popular browsers, but also, it also outperforms them in terms of the average time it takes to block known and already tested malicious sites.

Here's how the study ranks the browsers:

Microsoft Internet Explorer v8 (RC1) achieved 69% block rate
Mozilla Firefox v3.07 achieved just over 30% block rate
Apple Safari v3 achieved 24% block rate
Google Chrome 1.0.154 achieved 16% block rate
Opera 9.64 achieved 5% block rate