Which browser is safest? The answer may surprise you

Web browsers are one of the main ways that malware finds its way onto your machine. Tests carried out by NSS Labs looked at the five major players, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer to see which offers the best protection against more than 700 examples of real-world malware.

And the safest is... (Drum roll and a long, reality TV-style pause...) Internet Explorer 10, blocking 99.96 percent of known malicious downloads. Chrome comes second on 83.16 percent with the other three trailing a long way behind at around 10 percent each. This might come as a surprise to all those people who have long shunned Microsoft’s browser in favor of third-party alternatives on the grounds that they were safer.