Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2.0

Security

Internet security has become a massive issue over the past 18 months. The large amount of attacks against Internet Explorer and Windows XP have caused many people to switch to Firefox out of sheer panic and regard for their system integrity.

Both IE and FF include pop-up blockers that are switched on by default, so no changes there. But both new browsers claim to tackle the increasing problem of phishing - websites that try to trick users into revealing their account details for online banks or services like PayPal. How do these new features stack up?

Internet Explorer 7: Phishing filtering is switched on by default, and switching it off requires delving into Internet Options.

Asking the filter to check a website, it quite rightly flags bit-tech as a safe webpage to visit.

We fed IE a phishing link that we had received as email SPAM - one of the many 'Please update your PayPal account details' emails that we receive every week (or, rather, we would if we didn't have decent email filtering). Trying to load this in IE7 gave us this rather dire warning - spot on, a good result.

Firefox 2: Our tests in FF, unfortunately, weren't as successful.

Firefox offers you the choice of using a provided local list of phishing sites, reguarly updated by Mozilla, or using a list provided by Google (subject to a rather hefty disclaimer).

Unfortunately, neither block list stopped us from pasting in our SPAM URL and being presented with a PayPal-esque page requesting all our account details. Clearly, both Mozilla and Google need to work on keeping a phishing list that's as up to date as Microsoft's.