The browser wars are heating up again, but this time the focus is phishing and the prize is the title for best at detecting phishing web sites before unwary users get hooked.

A number of studies have been published over the last few months comparing the performance of the handful of browsers that claim to be able to spot phishing web sites and alert the user that they might want to give the suspicious site a wide berth.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox boast phishing detection, with different studies giving each the edge over the other. Earthlink also has a contender, as has McAfee (with its recently-acquired SiteAdvisor), and Netcraft.

So far the tests are pretty meaningless. Many are based on small samples (some testing as few as 50 web sites) to be of any great value and others are funded by the manufacturers - a study funded by Microsoft found IE to be superior, and another study paid for by Mozilla a few weeks later claimed Firefox as the winner. And we know from experience that the phishers are very good at figuring out the weaknesses of these defenses and rendering them obsolete..

But having used most of these phishing tools I think the biggest problem is that users won't use them. They'll ignore the warnings the browsers provide or they just won't understand how the warnings work. More likley though, after a few trys they'll simply disable the browser because they can often slow down surfing as they check each site before making a recommendation. Most users still put convenience and simplicity over security and that's a hard habit to break. No matter how clever a paid researcher claims you are.