IE9 with SmartScreen Leads Malware Protection Once Again

You kidding? There could be a few million running it, and yeah, that means personal systems. Think about all the pirated copies, think about the "XP still works for me" crowd, think about all the dinky systems kids bought for their parents/grandparents, think about other countries besides the U.S. 50% of the global market is still millions of users, whether that be business or personal. XP won't die tomorrow night..there should be some sort of remote nuke MS can fire off to kill it, lol.

 

I'm still running Windows XP on a 9 year old system with 256MB RAM. Runs just fine even with that amount of memory. I just can't be bothered upgrading, until I have to.

 

Mine is almost the same, the only diff is that my system is 8 years old and have 512 MB of RAM
So no usage of IE9 here either.

 

Yes. lol

 

Many PCs are still running XP...Especially, outside the USA...

 

Some people haven't traveled widely

Not that that's a bad thing but someone claimed it broadens one's outlook

Whatever

 

Disabling Protected Mode wouldn't affect IE9 proved superior malware block rate, as the malware blocking in IE9 is done by components not related to Protected Mode: the SmartScreen filter and the App Reputation.

However, disabling Protected Mode could, for sure, affect IE9 "unknown exploit" block rate.

Anyways, it's clear that what was tested by NSS Labs was the malware block rate, which is a way more important threat, as this statement explains:

 

=p next time I'm in Europe I'll be sure to take a survey on operating systems.

 

It is Not only Europe...Did you try in Asia, Latin America, and Africa?
Many XP-supported PCs (both Home and Enterprise) are Still Functional.

 

I got the feeling that I had come across something very similar recently. Anyway, looks like IE9 is onto a winner here!

 

Yes i know but NSS Labs was a member of AMTSO but they have been banned, i can't remember why...

 

In future if you could paste a link proving your utter nonsense, that would be appreciated. Google & Bing search also disagree with you.

edit: after trying various searches the best I could find was this:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/06/anti-virus-is-a-poor-substitute-for-common-sense/

Seems like NSS left AMTSO and with (what they felt was) good reasoning. I wonder if AV-TEST and AV-C have similar reasoning.

 

I would like to know, too.

 

Seems like I did a good thing by making my parents switch to IE9.

 

Which Browser did your Parents use, before they switched to IE9?

 

IE8

 

I dont want to post links because it's just my opinion. No matter if the were kicked or they quit from AMTSO, testing browsers malware protection is useless. I agree about common sense, that what every user needs but other than that the second line of defense is always be the antivirus, not the browser wich is a communication platform. It is good if a browser warns about phishing sites but that is just an extra feature. The main feature of the browsers is how fast and how effective their information gathering for the user.

Choosing a browser by how effective in malware protection is like choosing a car by it's color. This is still my opinion don't get too upset about it.

 

My apologies then, you didn't express it like that, you expressed it as a fact so I just assumed as such.

Why exactly?

The browser's malware filter is quite clearly a first and free line of defense. There is no reason not to take advantage of it and users obviously benefit greatly.

Did anyone state otherwise?

This clearly isn't the case, I haven't seen a post here saying "I'm going to switch to IE9 because of this".

 

I'm in Europe, in my experience, most work places are still running XP. Most individuals are running Win 7, with a few still using Vista.

 

In Asia and Africa, one can find even more XP-running PCs...

 

I'm pretty sure you're right. Let's face it, some hardware can carry on working quite productively for years, not unlike an old car that can just keep running for years with little maintenance. It was all very well for MS to make Vista/Seven need a minimum gigabyte of RAM, but most PCs at the time Vista was introduced just didn't have (or need) that. This is one of the reasons XP has lasted for so long. We've already discussed the economic ramifications & reasons for this in many other threads here at Wilders. It doesn't make them any less relevant though. It's not surprising that XP is still being used in less developed parts of the world. It's not surprising it's still being used in a lot of the developed world. There are not many colleges that I have seen that are not still running XP. At a time of educational funding cuts it's also implausible for many of them to just upgrade their hardware en masse no matter how good or safe IE9 is.

 

And no matter how safe a browser is, there are other ways to achieve "safety" while browsing.

 

Yeah, but definitely not with these guys LOL!

 

Imho, these less developed countries should just move to Linux if there are economic factors. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to agree with the "XP still works" or "hardware" arguments anymore. Not when the biggest percentage of malware out there targets the thing. I don't buy the "software incompatibility" excuse either. In my mind, if you rely on software so old that it absolutely requires a 10+ year old OS, perhaps you may want to think about things.

 

What about all of the schools, colleges & hospitals in the developed world who can't realistically shell out the spondoolies for new hardware? Some colleges I have seen have computers that are only around five to six years old. They were brought when XP was the current MS OS. I don't think they will all convert to Linux when they can still quite easily run XP.

Yes, I agree with you. But it just isn't an economic reality for many users of XP. I have an old box that runs XP. The computer itself hasn't really been run that much & is in very good condition. It would be expensive to try & upgrade its hardware & I reckon it has quite a few years left in it (at least as a back up) I plan to run it with Ubuntu when I get around to setting it up (its in storage at the moment). I don't know much about Linux but I am prepared to learn. Again, unfortunately, most people are familair with MS & wouldn't probably like to have to learn how to use Linux.

There are plenty of computers in use today in the first world, some maybe only four or five years old, that don't have the RAM to run Win 7. A hell of a lot of people will just continue to run those XP boxes into the ground & only upgrade when they absolutely have to. I know plenty of people who do this. Most probably have even less knowledge of computers than I do. These are the people who are almost certainly the malware magnets & possibly (inadvertently) causing many of the problems for others out of sheer ignorance (which isn't bliss no matter what anyone says).

Again, at the end of the day, this is all a matter of economic realities. Especially at the moment.

I can't explain why anyone would still want to run IE 6 though!