Sophos asked readers of our Naked Security blog a few weeks ago to vote for the “most trusted web browser,” to find out which browser people feel most comfortable with for security and privacy.

The results were fascinating: Firefox won by a huge margin over Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, with a few write-in votes for alternative browser clients like Tor.

But by looking at which web browsers people who visited Naked Security were actually using, it turns out people voting for Firefox weren’t necessarily using Firefox. In fact, although Firefox got 48% of the vote for most trusted, only about 20% were using Firefox.

Many of those Firefox fans are using Chrome, although with some skepticism about its security. Many of the comments by readers expressed serious distrust in Google.

Even if they are turning over all of their personal data to Google, they don’t feel good about it.

Similarly, only 7% of poll-takers said they trust Internet Explorer, but 14% were using Microsoft’s browser at the time. We might infer that Microsoft has some trust issues as well.

The problem here is that we do place a lot of trust in our web browsers: for our web searches, the sites we visit, our social media and email, our storage for photos and precious documents, and our passwords to all of these websites.

Giving up control of your data to the web browser is not just blind trust, it’s “security suicide,” says security analyst Davey Winder, who wrote about Sophos’s browser trust poll for ITPro.

Businesses need to be thinking about those employees who work from home or outside of the office – and whether to trust them to be “doubtful” about the security of the clients they’re using, Winder says.

We agree that you shouldn’t trust blindly.

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