Opera 9.5 to include antimalware protection

On Friday Opera announced that version 9.5 of the browser (download Opera 9.5 beta for Windows or Mac) will include built-in antimalware protection from Haute Secure (download for Windows 32-bit or Windows 64-bit).

This is, of course, to counter the antimalware protection built into Firefox 3, currently available as a final release candidate (download for Windows or Mac). Firefox uses data from Google and StopBadware to block a site before it loads on your browser.

Haute Secure counters that its offering is better because it relies upon a community of dedicated users to inform the product when to block and when not. In testing at CNET, the latest version of Haute Secure still misses some recently published phishing sites, while Firefox 3 RC2 blocked them immediately.

How did that happen? Haute Secure explains that the APIs provided by antiphishing sites such as PhishTank won't update until the site is confirmed to be bad, whereas Google can make that determination on its own. Still, Haute Secure prevents malicious sites (as opposed to mere phishing sites) from loading, and provides more information about those sites than does Firefox 3.

Haute Secure was founded by a group of former Microsoft employees, and its flagship product came out of beta in March.

[LAR Games]

You gotta love Firefox.

-Luis

[krosavcheg]

FF 2 was crap ! it wsa slow and consumed 300 MB RAM and crashes, without any extension installed ! hope 3 will be better.

[JadedGamer]

I use the 9.5 beta on my Mac at home (because 9.27 decided to go crazy when loading newsgroups), and have seen the filter in action Not too intrusive.

[bugm3n0t]

Good ol' Opera. Glad to see this vital anti-malware feature in 9.5. Now if only Opera could load media plugins correctly, run Flash consistently, and stop crashing when web pages want to resize themselves automatically . . . Boy, then we'd have a browser!