I am betting that this is a headline, or story, that nobody would have thought they would ever read when it comes to Internet Explorer but according to the newest report from NSS Labs Internet Explorer 9 is king of the hill when it comes to blocking malware.

According to the report 92 percent of malware was blocked with when IE9′s URL-based filtering was enabled and believe it or not but 100 percent with the Application-based filtering enabled.

Second place surprisingly went to Internet Explorer 8 blocking 90 percent, third was a tie between Safari 5, Chrome 10, and Firefox 4 blocking 13 percent. Last place went to Opera 11 which only blocked 5 percent of malware.

This study was based on going to sites that relied on tricking users into installing malicious software, it wasn’t based on sites that required browser flaws to initiate an attack. The study also was strictly based on European users where the URLs visited were harvested from spam e-mails, instant messages, and from posts on the various social networks.

via Ars Technica