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Google Chrome is the safest browser

Software companies like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google have gotten into a battle to gain the web browser market share.?

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First it was Internet Explorer and Mozilla as the 2 strong contenders in the market but now theres Chrome and theres Safari ever since its release for Windows.?

In the past few days Microsoft took Internet Explorer out of beta after almost a year while Google once again released a beta version of Chrome, its free, open-source browser. This only shows how lucrative the browser market is for software vendors!?

While Internet Explorer is still the strongest player coupled with the fact that Microsoft Windows still comes pre-installed with IE, Firefox has been taking a cut from Microsoft’s browser pie ever since.

Where there is a market there is Google!

We all know the search giant – wherever there is a market to penetrate Google will do its best to be there. And this has become pretty clear from Google’s open-source. Everyone seems to boast about how fast their browser is or how feature rich it is compared to other browsers. But has anyone ever compared about the security of these browsers? Nope. Until now.

Web Browser Security Faceoff

CanSecWest conducted a contest called Pwn2Own in Vancouver, Canada. In this 4 day long contest which took place from 16th March through 20th March hackers tried bringing the browsers to their knees by uncovering security flaws.

This was the 3rd year of the competition and focused on 2 of the hottest technologies among the big players -

1. Web browsers

2. Mobile devices

The intention of the competition was to uncover security vulnerabilities that were yet to be found in these browsers and mobile devices. The reward for finding a single bug in the browser was worth $5000 and $10,000 if the bug was found in a mobile device.

The Results of the Pwn2Own Contest

The contest revealed very interesting results. The browsers that were up for faceoff were -

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer

2. Mozilla Firefox

3. Apple Safari

4. Google Chrome

Among the browsers Apple’s Safari was the MOST Vulnerable and was exploited in…ahem…about 10 seconds! A total of 4 flaws were found and almost all the browsers were affected but Google’s Chrome was found to be the MOST Secure. It was impacted by the flaw but the hackers said that it couldn’t be exploited by any of the known techniques. The actual exploits were not made public for the very obvious reasons. The exploits will be handed over to the respective vendors to patch them and release as soon as possible.

One of the most surprising result that has come forward is that NO vulnerability was found for mobile devices!