Germany’s Cybersecurity Agency Recommends Firefox As Most Secure Browser

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany’s cyber-security agency — the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik — BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge 44. The tests did not include other browsers like Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi. The audit was carried out using rules detailed in a guideline for “modern secure browsers” that the BSI published last month, in September 2019. The BSI normally uses this guide to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. The article includes a list of all the minimum requirements required for the BSI to consider a browser “secure.” It also lists the areas where the other browsers failed, such as: Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, IE, Edge); No built-in update mechanism (IE), and No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge).