Opera 9.10 is out today with the the addition of what they’re wisely calling “Fraud Protection” (Firefox calls phished or spoofed sites “suspected forgeries“).
Similar to Firefox’s hybrid approach, wherein you can either download a list of sites to your computer or instead run checks against a Google service, Opera downloads a list of URLs from Phishtank and then runs a query against GeoTrust to see if the domain you’re visiting is legit.
It’s interesting to see that the heaviest area of browser “innovation” in the past couple years seems to be in anti-phishing, anti-spam, anti-popups, anti-forgeries, anti-fraud and generally fighting other things that make the Internet suck.
Now, at least, most of the major browsers are caught up with technology that will submit your surfing habits to third party sites in the interest of protecting you from the baddies, though it’s of course curious the choice of partners in each case and how this benefits each, enabling them to learn from this data… For example, in the case of Firefox or Microsoft, who partnered with Google and… Microsoft… respectively, will they also be able to use this information to improve their search results and advertising tactics? They say no, but hey now, if they’re the only choice on the block, that puts them in a pretty powerful position to determine who’s on the up and up and who’s… not.
Factory Joe 