Mozilla touts Firefox phishing filter

It took Mozilla a while, but now it's got its own study on phishing shields to counter rival Microsoft.

Nearly two months ago, Microsoft trumpeted research results that said its phishing shield in Internet Explorer 7 is superior to the rivaling technology included in Firefox 2.

Not to be left behind, Mozilla selected testing company SmartWare to do a similar comparison. The result: Firefox 2 offers more effective phishing protection than IE 7.

Testers ran several known phishing Web sites through both IE 7 and Firefox 2. They found that, with the basic phishing protection enabled, Firefox caught 78.85 percent of the scam sites, while IE 7 flagged 66.35 percent.

Also, the test results note, Microsoft's shield sends a user's Web site request to Microsoft to check if a site is part of a phishing scam. Firefox, on the other hand, by default uses a locally stored blacklist that is regularly updated, which benefits user privacy.

The complete Mozilla study is available online.