IE8 Released Today : Will It Offer More Protection?

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 at noon Eastern time today. Boasting new, user friendly features and more protection, this may well be worth looking in to; don't expect your ISP to support it quite yet though.

The browser has been downloaded tens of millions of times since it entered public testing mode a little more than a year ago, constituting one of Microsoft's largest beta tests ever. Improved security is one of IE8's most significant features. NSS Labs released an independent study early Thursday showing IE8 significantly besting Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera in catching and blocking malware. With its SmartScreen filtering, IE8 Release Candidate 1 caught 69% of malware, while Firefox 3.07 caught only 30%.

As for security, IE8 is supposed to be offering more protection from the nasty malware that is going around right now (I.E. AntivirusXP/Vista/360 etc...). During beta testing one IE8 user in 40 got a malware block, while 1 million users per month were prevented from browsing to phishing sites. IE8 also contains a number of other security features, including an InPrivate Browsing mode that keeps no trail of browsing history and new features that prevents certain cross-site scripting attacks, click-jacking, and the installation of malicious ActiveX controls.

With every success there must also be failure and one hacker was able to hijack a machine running the IE8 release candidate and Windows 7 beta but competitive browsers were hacked as well during a contest at the CanSecWest security conference on Wednesday.

Of course there are all kinds of other bells and whistles included but we are focusing on the security portion of this. Hopefully it will slow down the spread of malware as it appears to be on the rise.