Microsoft’s flagship is better than Chrome and Firefox for identifying malicious sites.
Microsoft Edge has been found to be significantly better than rival browsers at identifying and blocking phishing attacks.
In new research published by security analysis firm NSS Labs, Microsoft’s Edge browser offered the most protection against online threats, and was better at identifying new phishing URLs than Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Its Web Browser Security Comparative Reports, seen by MSPoweruser, measured the performance of leading browsers across 36,120 test cases, which included 1,136 hidden URLs designed to delivering phishing attacks against a user’s PC.
Over a 23 day period, Microsoft Edge was able to block an average of 92.3% of the malicious URLs, compared to 74.5% blocked by Chrome, and just 61.1% stopped on Firefox.
In terms of identifying new phishing URLs, Edge also roundly beat the competition, achieving a zero-hour protection rate of 81.8%, compared to 58.6% and 50.7% for Chrome and Firefox.
Interestingly, although there was a marked difference between the browsers, the report found that a locked-down operating system made little impact on the overall performance. Microsoft Edge performed just as well on Windows 10 as it did on Windows 10 S, and there was no difference between Google Chrome on ChromeOS and Windows 10.
It will be welcome news for Microsoft, given that it has been trying to push Edge onto its Windows 10 users, who are still overwhelmingly turning to other software for a default browser. Various versions of Google’s Chrome browser hold over 37% of the market share, while Microsoft’s Edge is one of the least popular at 4%.
To put that into context, Microsoft’s older Internet Explorer 11 browser, most recently updated in 2015, still has almost 12% of the market share despite Microsoft’s efforts to phase it out.
