14 DAY TRIAL // For the past three years, security vendor Sophos has been asking users "Which web browser do you trust?" and making the results available on their blog every October.
The results for the 2015 edition of this poll are in, and as in the previous two years, the winner is once again Firefox with 41% of the 3,928 votes.
Second on the list is Google Chrome with 21%, followed by Opera with 16%, and Safari with 8%, closely reproducing the poll's results from previous years.
Other browsers that also got votes include TOR with 6%, Internet Explorer with 3%, Chromium and Microsoft Edge, both with 2%.
Ironically, Tor is less trusted than Firefox
Weird is the fact that Tor, the browser made famous by Edward Snowden, the last bastion of privacy and security in the world of Web browsing products, scored only 6%, much less than Sophos (and we) anticipated, 2015 being the first year when Tor was added to the poll.
While Tor is the browser of choice for journalists, national dissidents, and any international man of mystery, the browser, despite the plethora of security-focused features, has failed to attract new users to its side.
The poll is in no way indicative of how popular browsers are, and as the Browser Trust Gap table seen below shows, many users that have visited the poll page with one browser ended up voting for another browser.
| Firefox | Chrome | IE | Safari | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 19.5% | -12.3% | -5.2% | -0.9% |
| 2014 | 19.5% | -8.6% | -8.2% | -1.2% |
| 2014 | 14.3% | -19.6% | -9.2% | -1.1% |
According to the data, Chrome has a -19.6% browser trust gap, meaning that, from the total of 40.78% of users that voted in the poll (via Chrome), 19.6% of them voted for another browser.
We would have expected this to happen for Internet Explorer, but not for Chrome. The simplest explanation for this trend is the fact that Chrome is developed by Google, a company that has recently ditched its long-lasting company motto of "Don't be evil!"
