It’s long been “cool” in the tech world to diss Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, often for good reason. That led to the continuing success of rival browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome, both of which have captured substantial market share. But new research suggests it may be by far the safest browser to use.

A new study from NSS Labs says that IE9 stops almost 100 percent of all malware it touches, outperforming rival browsers.

NSS Labs fired a barrage of malware at the browsers in its test, having them cruise more than 5,000 suspcious sites, of which 1,188 tried to deliver malware.

IE9 performed best and caught 99.2 percent of the live threats, 96 percent with its SmartScreen URL reputation and 3.2 percent with Application Reputation.

IE9 trounced Google’s Chrome 12, which caught only 13.2 percent of the threats, up from 3 percent in 2010. Apple’s Safari 5 and Mozilla’s Firefox each blocked only 7.6 percent of live threats, although they beat Opera, which nabbed only 6.1 percent of threats.

NSS says “The significance of Microsoft’s new application reputation technology cannot be overstated.  ”Application Reputation is the first attempt by any vendor to create a definitive list of every application on the Internet. This new capability helps users discern malware, and potentially unsafe software from actual good software.”

Research has shown that many people get caught by drive-by malware attacks delivered when they click on links in search results, email or social networking sites, which is why browser blocking of malware is so important.

Personally, we’ve been using Chrome the most lately, due to its speed. Firefox seems to have as many problems now as IE used to. But we may have to start using IE9 again.

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Tags: Apple Safari, browsers, drive-by malware, Google Chrome, IE9 safest browser, malware, Mozille Firefox, NSS Labs. IE9 stops most malware