Opera 9.5 Adds Anti-Malware Protection
Opera has announced a new partnership with Haute Secure which will add anti-malware and phishing protection to the company’s forthcoming Opera 9.5 web browser.
The Haute Secure tools are somewhat different than what you’ll find in Firefox 3, which also features phishing and malware protection. Where Firefox relies on Google and StopBadware data to find phishing sites, Haute Secure’s software pulls its protection list from a community-maintained list.
Because anyone can submit sites to Haute Secure, the company sometimes takes a bit longer to add sites to its listing (since it needs to verify that submitted sites are in fact bad). However, one decided advantage is that Haute Secure is much more fine-grained. In other words, rather blocking domains the way Google often does, Haute Secure blocks URLs.
The end result is that where Firefox might block an entire domain where some pages contain malware (say MySpace or other large social networks with a few bad apples), Haute Secure would only block pages that were known to propagate malware.
The service also provides a bit more detail about the blocked pages than you’ll get from Firefox 3’s built-in tools.
If you like Haute Secure’s approach, but don’t use Opera, fear not, there’s a Windows version that works with both Firefox and IE as well.
Regardless of which you prefer at least we’re well on our way to a world where anti-malware features are a standard part of the browser suite.
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