The report comes from NSS Labs, a security research and testing group. The organization released two reports today that show that Internet Explorer 9 with its SmartScreen feature "caught an exceptional 96 (percent of the live threats" in worldwide tests. An additional 3.2 percent of malware threats were stopped with IE's Application Reputation feature." NSS Labs claims that Google's 12th version of its Chrome web browser only caught 13.2 percent of the malware threats. The fourth version of Firefox stopped just 7.6 percent of online threats while Apple's fifth version of its Safari web browser also caught just 7.6 percent of the malware threats it encountered. The same studies said that the same results were found when the same browsers are used in Asian and European territories.

Microsoft says that since the NSS Labs' last report on this subject in October 2010, "... the average time taken by SmartScreen filter to block a threat has gotten 28 (percent) faster - and if Application Reputation is considered, then the average time has improved by 85 percent."