These reports smelled like rotten fish from the 1st day, so if one investigates, this comes as interesting

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/03/26/malware-report-from-nss-labs-manipulates-statistics
To quote
- Safari 4 and Firefox 3.1 were left out, while IE8 RC, a non-final version, is allowed
- The report says that 7% of the threats were blocked by all browsers, but Opera is claimed to have blocked only 5%
- They started out with 150 000 URLs, but ended up with only 492 in the final test
- Out of the 492 final tests, the same site could have up to 10% of the URLs, meaning that in a "worst case scenario", 10 unique sites were tested! If a browser did particularly well on one of these sites making up more than 10% of the test, their score would obviously be inflated (the report mentions that a number of sites were pruned after reaching their limit)
- According to the "Malware URL Response" table on page 3, Opera catches 15% on hour 0, and 33% after 5 days. And yet the final rate was set to only 5%
- According to the same table, Chrome consistently catches 25% or more, but the final score is only 16%
- The same table shows that IE8 never reaches 69% even once in the table, and yet its final score is raised to 69%
- On the other hand, IE7 has a total score of 17% in the table, but the final score is lowered to 4%

And I did my own analysis, considering their document http://nsslabs.com/test-reports/NSSLabs_Q12010_GTRBrowserSEM_FINAL.pdf
- they have not made the list of urls used for testing public -> this is a major issue, while makes their research basically useless
- they have used an initial couple thousand urls from the *IE* phising database (not officially recognized though, need to find reference)
- during testing they reduce the number of urls used to account for the final results (arguably to make some browser to stand out?) (page 7)

Lots of the data beween reports does not reflect normal protection patterns.
In this report http://nsslabs.com/test-reports/NSS Labs Browser Security - Socially Engineered Malware Q3 2009.pdf opera has the best time of 5.5 hours to add new blocks, while on another report http://nsslabs.com/test-reports/NSSLabs_Q12010_GTRBrowserSEM_FINAL.pdf it is 82 hours (!!?).
Notice that Opera also gets roughly 50% against phising, but >1% on malware protection. Given that the blocked urls that Opera uses come from Thawte, Netcraft, and Phishtank, this smells fishy. Actually, it almost seems like all those three sources are useless. Also, both Mozilla and Chrome are using Google for their blacklists. What magic is Microsoft doing that makes them so much better than anything else ?

Anyways, this is more of a big Microsoft sponsored study than anything else. Nothing to see here, just the same deceiving tactics, but this time someone else was was paid to say it.

IE is NOT the best browser.
Its the worst.

I've been saying it all along. The only reason the rivals are "more" secure is due to the market. It's obvious that more are willing to target IE when theres far more users. It's the same story along with Mac OS X and Windows too, the only reason windows gets heat in public perception is due to market share and compitability.

Windows have so many drivers, and support so much hardware, it literally just pisses all over Mac OS X, and the more code, the more vulnerabilities and exploits - obviously. And then theres the market share, why would anyone wanna create a trojan for Mac OS when they can create a trojan for Windows and have far more users to target. Not to mention, that all computer newbies use Windows.

This study was funded by Microsoft. Fact. Look it up.

are you kidding me?! internet explorer and best security?!?!? ahahahahahahhaha
just with activeX i can hack into people's computers and EVEN change the speed their fans spin....
internet explorer is the most bloated, slow, insecure browser out there and its a matter of time it loses to Chrome/Chromium and Firefox

The MS hate is so predominant here. You don't want to give IE 8 any credit at all. Yes, it is not the fastest browser doing java, it does not support the latests drafts of CSS and HTML 5 that are still in the works. But Microsoft, as the maker of the OS most attacked by malware and criticism has to have learned a thing or two about how to combat it. MS security essentials was given praise and caught more malware than then old veteran anti-virus makers. And I use IE 8 and I know is secure. The guys that criticize it here don't even use it. The fact is that most of the other browsers do not even have a focus in protection against social engineering threats, so why should they be better? Countering a scientific study with a blog from a competitor is not the best way. Why don't Google or Apple or Mozilla refute these findings, why some other security firm refutes it? They have the money, they could sponsor their own. So I rest my case. Give credit when is due and stop the hate.

are you kidding me?
IE = worst.