We’ve put Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Opera through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in our rankings?
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Web Browser Grand Prix: The Top Five, Tested And Ranked
With all the promise offered by the Internet, it seems to be evolving instead into a rabbit warren of risk. Can’t step outside your ‘door’ without risking a knife in the ribs. The danger, luckily, isn’t uniform. McAfee, which offers Internet security software, has pieced together a world map identify which countries and which domains are the most risky.
McAfee used its SiteAdvisor technology to crawl the web and test domains for security threats--a total of 27 million domains in all. Overall, McAfee reports that 5.8% of them were a problem. The percentage of risky sites is up over 2007 and 2008, but, McAfee says, because of a change in methodology it’s not possible to say the Internet has become more risky.
The places to avoid? By Top Level Domain (TLD) they are .CM (Cameroon), with a risk factor of 36.7%, .COM (Commercial), 32.3%, .CN (People’s Republic of China), 23.4%, .WS (Samoa), 17.8%, and .INFO (Information), 15.8%. For downloads the worst place to be is .RO (Romania).
The safest places to play on the Internet (and perhaps the least interesting), are .GOV (Government), .JP (Japan), .EDU (Education), .IE (Ireland), and .HR (Croatia).
The Untied States sits toward the top of the risky list, ranked 17th, with a risk ratio of 3.1%.
McAfee also says the likelihood of receiving spam if registering with an email address has dropped from 7.6% to 2.8%. And the percent of sites delivering viruses, spyware or adware has edged down, from 4.7% to 4.5%. (McAfee cautions that this last finding doesn’t mean there are fewer Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) in the tubes, but rather they are getting harder to detect using standard procedures.)
Overall, sites registered in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are relatively safe. Sites registered in the Asia-Pacific region are not.
Image Credit: McAfee
A recent ComScore survey on Internet usage is reporting that Microsoft might not be leading the way in search, but in terms of total hours spend online, it has a commanding lead over its competition. The survey, which measured a whopping 27 billion hours of Internet usage by Web users aged 15 or older is an increase of nearly 24% over the year prior, and of those studied, over 3.9 billion hours were spent using Microsoft services. Google came in a not so close second place with around 2.5 billion hours.
The big winner in the Microsoft portfolio might surprise you however, with about 70 percent of the usage being attributed to Windows Live Messenger. Of course, this number measures time spent “online” and not just those “actively engaged” with the service, but it certainly shows the popularity of Microsoft’s instant messenger. Google’s numbers are pretty typical explain analysts, since they make it their business using search to try and get you “in and out” as quickly as possible. The most successful Google property continues to be YouTube with nearly 1.2 billion hours logged watching video.
Yahoo placed third with 1.7 billion hours, and Facebook commanded a respectable fourth place with 1.4 billion hours. The individual rankings may have been a bit of a shock, but the trend showing “Internet usage on the rise” certainly isn’t. Did any of these results surprise you? Let us know what you think.
