The answer may be surprising to some, but according to leading security firm NSS Labs, there's a new champ in town.

NSS Labs tested the top 5 browsers on the market today; Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, Mozilla Firefox 19 and Opera 12 to see how they would respond to "live" testing. Each browser was pointed to series 900+ URL's that had known infections embeded in thier sites. At the end of testing, guess what? IE 10 FTW! Yeah, you read that right. IE 10 crushed everyone.

IE 10 blocked a whopping 99.96% of the infested sites followed by Chrome at 83.16% (respectable), Safari at 10.15%, Firefox at 9.92% and Opera pulling up the rear at a measly 1.87% effective rate.



_{Source: NSS Labs}


The reports goes on to explain the large differential is due to Chrome and IE 10's integration of download protection as well as Microsoft implementation of CAMP (content agnostic malware protection). CAMP, in a nutshell, will warn you if a file is not downloaded often and give you a choice to discard it. Both these features do lead to higher false positives which are a nuisance, but clearly at nuisance can be the price of security.

You can head over to NSS Labs and grab some more detail or download the report directly in PDF form. It's worth the read.

So there you have it folks. Time to ditch Firefox and jump on the IE 10 Bandwagon?