minooie20090814062847500.jpegAn independent security product company named NSS Labs has found Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 to be the most secure browser to date.

Testing Safari 4, Google Chrome 2, Internet Explorer IE 8, Firefox 3, and Opera 10 beta over a two-week period in July indicated that IE 8 was supposedly the best browser at blocking phishing and malware attacks.

Firefox 3 equaled IE 8 in catching “social-engineering” phishing attacks.

“Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 were the most consistent in the high level of protection they offered,” the NSS Labs study said. When it came to blocking malicious software, malware, IE 8 caught 81 percent of the “live threats” as compared with the 54-percent finish by the second-place Firefox.

Apple’s  Safari 4 was apparently the poorest of the lot, landing in the bottom three in every test.

What is important to note however is that the entire project was sponsored by Microsoft. As Ars Technica points out, that’s not to say that IE 8 isn’t a drastic improvement on previous versions of the browser, with specific reference to security but the report needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

NSS Labs President did respond in regard to sponsoship and said “this stuff is expensive to do right, and we need to monetize it somehow,” … “We invited Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera to participate, but they didn’t even bother to respond, except for Opera, which stated they “don’t really focus on malware.”