"With a unique URL blocking score of 99.9 percent and over-time protection rating of 99.2 percent, Internet Explorer 9 was by far the best at protecting against socially-engineered malware," it added.

The unique URL blocking score measures what percentage of malicious links a browser blocks when those links first become active. The overtime protection rating looks at what percentage of malicious links a browser blocks over a period of days.

Internet Explorer's test results left the scores of four competing browsers in the dust. The over-time protection rate for Google Chrome, for example, was 13.2 percent, while for Firefox 4 and Safari 5 it was 7.6 percent and for Opera 11, 6.1 percent.

"Microsoft is the most attacked company in the world, so this is something they have a lot of experience with," said NSS President and CEO Rick Moy. The Redmond giant collects data on all the attacks on their products to create the list of benign and malicious applications that drive Application Reputation.