Microsoft's claims that it has invested heavily in bulletproofing Internet Explorer 8 as much as possible are by no means a simple marketing strategy to pass the browser as offering a high level of security for end users. In fact, a recent study performed by the NSS Labs signaled out IE8 as the safest browser compared to Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE7, when it comes down to protecting its users against social engineering threats and malware. The Redmond company revealed that with the pre-RTW development milestones of Internet Explorer 8 it managed to block one in every 200 downloads as malicious. All thanks to the IE8 SmartScreen feature.

“SmartScreen’s malware protection focuses on identifying and blocking sites on the web that are distributing malicious software. As a reputation-based feature, SmartScreen can block new threats from existing malicious sites, even if those threats are not yet blocked by traditional anti-virus or anti-malware signatures. In this way, the SmartScreen filter complements traditional anti-virus products by providing additional dimensions for both identification and protection,” explained Eric Lawrence, IE program manager.

In just half a year ahead of IE8's official launch on March 19, 2009, the SmartScreen filter blocked in excess of 10 million pieces of malware from infecting user machines. In this regard, the feature blocked malicious code from compromising one in 40 computers running IE8 per week. In fact, Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate was credited with an effectiveness rate of 69%, more than double that of any rival browser, including Firefox and Safari.

“SmartScreen delivers blocks both in the navigation experience and in the file download experience depending on the situation. This level of control allows us to block entirely malicious sites, portions of sites or just a single malicious download on an otherwise clean site (for instance, a social networking or file-sharing site). Similar to our anti-phishing efforts, we source the malware data based on a combination of Microsoft internal and 3rd party data to deliver the most relevant, comprehensive protection,” Lawrence added.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Windows is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Linux is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Mac OS X is available here.

The latest development milestone of Google Chrome is available for download here.

Opera 9.64 and 10.0 Build 1345 Alpha are available for download here.