Measuring How Secure Your Web Browser is

Microsoft just released a website named Your browser matters that no only does check and measure the security of your browser in use but also explains it in detail what’s missing. It also shows off the increasing number of attacks blocked by the SmartScreen technology in real time.

Ok, that’s my IE 9′ s score on my Windows 7 machine. My default browser, Chrome, scores 2.5 in a yellow background. Firefox is on a shame 2 out of 4. What about IE 8? It’s scored 3 out of 4 on my XP machine.

You may think that’s not surprise because after all IE was measured by a tool created by the same owner. I was thinking about the same, to be honest. But if you go click the link of What does this score mean? You would actually get to see what the measurements Microsoft took to measure the security of your browser. It measures in 4 categories, from dangerous downloads, phishing websites, to attacks on your browser and websites. Each category contains number of questions for your browser to answer. Answering yes to all of them in each category gets 1 score.

What’s better, for people who doesn’t know what’s these categories really about, there are 4 very well made animations from Learn More that you can watch and get easy understanding what’s behind these types of threads.

Microsoft does take security matter seriously, especially on the product like IE that had the bad reputation before. As much as we see IE 9 has scored the perfect 4 on that matter, we should applause to the work they’ve done and the tough mission they accomplished. Now, please also take the usability and other matters in IE as much as you take the security to make a browser I would truly use and love. As I state above, for now, I am more favor to a browser that makes my work faster and easier. For that reason, Chrome does work better than any others to me, including IE.