IE8 whips rivals in blocking malware sites

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) again beat the rival browsers in a test of their malware-blocking abilities, catching 81% of attack code-infected sites, according to a testing company.

IE8’s skills at sniffing out malware sites improved by 17% since March, said Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, the firm that conducted the benchmarks. The testing was sponsored by Microsoft’s security team.

While IE8 blocked eight of 10 of the malware-distributing sites that NSS included in its 12-day test, the nearest competitor, Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0, caught just 27% of the same sites. Apple’s Safari 4.0 and Google’s Chrome 2.0, meanwhile, blocked only 21% and 7% of the sites, respectively. Opera Software’s browser properly identified only 1%.

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Facebook, the NEXT Google?

Facebook is making strategic moves to evolve into something greater than just Myspace.com. It purchased FriendFeed, a popular niche social networking platform, and the talented development team that built it. It has rolled out new search functionality, and a new ability to share status updates with the entire network in real-time. It has rumored connections to the recently announced RockMelt web browser and is supposedly working on a payment system. All of these moves work to keep Facebook one step ahead of competing sites and establish itself as a must-use platform.

And why not? Facebook is no Google (yet), but they have amassed over 250+ million members in a relatively short amount of time. Every new member of Facebook is reaching out to their friends and family and inviting them to also join the Facebook network so they can share status updates, photos, compete against each other in web-based games, and take silly quizzes about what personality disorder they have.