NEW YORK: A study commissioned by Mozilla Foundation claims that the anti-phishing filter in Mozilla's Firebox 2.0 browser has outclassed similar tools available in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.
The study found that Firefox 2.0, which is said to be a more secured version than the earlier browsers, had blocked 81.5 per cent of all phishing websites, while IE7 prevented 66.35 per cent of the phishing operations.
Mozilla got the study carried out by a technology and strategy firm, Smartware, whose methodology and results of the study audited by security testing provider iSEC Partners.
Smartware had fed URLs of several known phishing sites in the browsers over a period of two weeks late October and early November based on data from an anti-phishing network run by Open DNS, called Phishtank. The company tested each browser against the same phishing sites.
While Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, IE7 blocked 117 sites that Firefox did not.
IE7 adopts a system of asking the user when the browser is installed whether he wants to allow the browser to auto-check all websites against a Microsoft database. On the contrary, Firefox, in its default setting, uses a blacklist of known phishing sites that is stored on the user's computer and updated approximately every 30 minutes. Firefox users can opt to turn auto-detection, in which case the browser will check websites the user visits by checking them against a database maintained by Google.
The Mozilla study follows a similar study by Microsoft in September, carried out by 3Sharp, which gave top marks to IE7. The study, however, did not test Firefox 2.0 but compared the browser to a series of seven third party security applications.
Mozilla's security chief Window Snyder said the study was part of the company's quality assurance process.
