In a new NSS Labs report, Microsoft Edge beat Chrome, Firefox, and Opera in phishing and malware security tests. The Microsoft Edge team celebrated the NSS Labs findings on Twitter. As far as blocking phishing attacks, the NSS Labs report found that Edge offered the best protection against phishing by using Microsoft Defender SmartScreen. By comparison, the other browsers in the report, including Chrome and Firefox, use Google Safe Browsing API, while Opera uses a combination of third-party blocklists.
“Microsoft Edge offered the most protection, blocking 95.5% of phishing URLs, while providing the highest zero-hour protection rate (89.2%). Google Chrome provided the second highest protection, blocking an average of 86.9%, followed by Mozilla Firefox at 85.9%. Opera blocked 79.2%.”
In a separate report, NSS Labs found that Microsoft Edge had superior malware protection when compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
“Microsoft Edge offered the most protection, blocking 98.5% of malware, while providing the highest zero-hour protection rate (96.7%). Firefox provided the second highest protection, blocking an average of 86.1%, followed by Google Chrome at 86.0%. Opera blocked 5.6%.
The core protection technology within Edge is SmartScreen, which provides URL-based protection from attacks via an integrated cloud-based URL-reputation service, as well as application reputation for malicious file blocking. SmartScreen with application reputation blocked 98.5% for Edge. In addition, Microsoft Defender SmartScreen blocked an additional 93.1% for Opera; 13.1% for Google Chrome; 13.0% for Firefox; and 0.7% malicious files for Edge.”
All of the NSS Labs findings were done using the new Edge browser that was released recently. All reports and findings are available for download here.
