On Friday Opera announced that version 9.5 of the browser will include built-in anti-malware protection from Haute Secure.

This is, of course, to counter the anti-malware protection built into Firefox 3, currently available as a final release candidate. Firefox uses data from Google and StopBadware to block a site before it loads on your browser.

Haute Secure counters that its offering is better because it relies upon a community of dedicated users to inform the product when to block and when not. In testing at CNET, the latest version of Haute Secure still misses some recently published phishing sites, while Firefox 3 RC2 blocked them immediately.

How did that happen? Haute Secure explains that the APIs provided by anti-phishing sites such as PhishTank won’t update until the site is confirmed to be bad, whereas Google can make that determination on its own. Still, Haute Secure prevents malicious sites (as opposed to mere phishing sites) from loading, and provides more information about those sites than does Firefox 3.

Haute Secure was founded by a group of former Microsoft employees, and its flagship product came out of beta in March.
Credit- CNET