Firefox 2.0 far better than IE7 at anti-phishing, but both still terrible

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 14 November 2006 17:25

Your IT - Entertainment

Normally when it comes to the ‘free’ software that Microsoft gives away, either on the web, or built into Windows, it’s the bare bones necessary to get the job done, so the third party market can make some money developing decent software. While this might have changed somewhat with some of the ‘free’ software built into Vista, a new report on the anti-phishing capabilities of Firefox and IE7 proves that IE7 has a long way to go.

A report in the Washington Post goes into great detail in a new report from SmartWare showing that in their tests, quote: “Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 blocked 117 sites that Firefox did not”.

If you read the original article, there are plenty of other stats, there’s information on default settings for the browsers and plenty more.

But let’s face facts: these results are terrible. They’re shocking and appalling. How is the average user supposed to have any idea how to configure their browser? Can they really trust that a site their browser says is safe, is actually safe?

What about the reverse? How many legitimate sites will be branded as untrustworthy by this anti-phishing feature which is clearly still stuck within the depths of buggy beta hell?

And in what may come as a shock to Internet users wanting the very fastest performance from their browsers, turning on the anti-phishing feature of IE7 actually slows things down quite a bit.

Turn the feature off, and your browser speeds back to life. You’d think this wouldn’t be a problem in the age of broadband, dual and quad core processors and gigabytes of RAM. But guess what, it still is.

There’s no question that an anti-phishing service is desperately needed on all modern computers. The thing is, it needs to be simple, safe and reliable. If it can be free to the end user, even better. If there’s a way for legitimate companies to validate themselves against this service, then bonus brownie points on top can be issued as well.

Of course the development work on anti-phishing technologies in browsers will continue, and one day, they’ll get it right.

Until then, my recommendation is to have a very good look at TrustDefender. Available from www.trustdefender.com, this software is free to download, free to use, has been through extensive beta testing and is available as an actual released product that has already gone through revisions and updates.

And it doesn’t rely upon working within a particular brand of browser, nor can it be easily hacked as browser based solutions can.

Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

A free software solution exists to tackle the problem today. Why rely on buggy beta-level features in the latest browsers that are plainly half-baked, as so ably demonstrated in the reports and links above?