Germany’s security agency, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has discovered that Mozilla’s Firefox browser is the most secure browser. However, the survey only compared Firefox with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge whilst ignoring other popular browsers like Safari,Opera Mini and UC browser.
BSI came up with that conclusion after assessing each browser’s capabilities against a set of guidelines which defines a secure browser. In other words, BSI’s guidelines is essentially a list of features that an internet browser must have to be termed as secure by the German agency. In this case, Firefox has all features, making it the most secure.
The other browsers that BSI found not to be secure lack the following features according to ZDNet:
- Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge)
- No built-in update mechanism (IE)
- No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge)
- No SOP (Same Origin Policy) support (Internet Explorer)
- No CSP (Content Security Policy) support (Internet Explorer)
- No SRI (Subresource Integrity) support (Internet Explorer)
- No support for browser profiles, different configurations (IE, Edge)
- Lack of organizational transparency (Chrome,Internet Explorer,Edge)
Even though Firefox is the most secure, when it comes to browser market share, Google Chrome is way ahead as it has 63% of the market share whereas Firefox only has 4.45% of the market. However, as the world gets more privacy and security-conscious, Firefox’s secureness will eventually pay off through the enlargement of its market share in the browser industry.
