14 DAY TRIAL // The Mozilla Foundations hired SmartWare, a business strategy firm, to release a study comparing the 2 products and their anti-phishing features. According to SecurityFocus, "Firefox 2.0 blocked 79 percent of the malicious sites just using the local black list of phishing URLs and blocked 82 percent of phishing sites using the real-time Google filtering feature. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7's anti-phishing features blocked only 66 percent of the sites with its auto-check feature enabled and only 2 percent with the autocheck feature disabled."
The security site also mentioned that "there were 243 instances where Firefox 2.0 blocked the phishing site, but Internet Explorer 7 did not. Another 117 instances where Internet Explorer 7 blocked a phishing site and Firefox 2.0 did not. In 65 instances, neither browser's anti-phishing tool blocked the site. The PhishTank data is not used by either browser as part of the decision of whether to block a site or not, according to Mozilla."
Microsoft built Internet Explorer 7 especially for security reasons, saying that "robust new Internet Explorer 7 architecture and improved security features help protect you against malicious software, and help to keep your personal data safe from fraudulent websites and online phishing scams."