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In a report from NSS Labs, the research company found that Microsoft Edge, the latest browser from the Redmond company, is more secure against phishing and malware than both Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.  The set of reports, which can be downloaded here, tested three current versions of each browser over the months of September and October to get the results which will likely come as a surprise to some.  The versions tested for the reports were:

• Google Chrome 53.0.2785
• Mozilla Firefox 48.0.2
• Microsoft Edge 38.14393.0.0

The first report focused on phishing where Edge achieved a 91.4% over the course of 12 days of testing at the NSS Labs in Austin, Texas in recognizing phishing URLs presented to it.  Chrome was at 82.4% while Firefox came in at 81.4%.  This is an important consideration in choosing a browser given the social engineering nature of phishing attacks which can lead to compromised accounts for users.

As expected, Lenovo has come to market with the first Project Tango enabled phone.  The 6.4″ Phab 2 Pro can be purchased directly from the manufacture for $499.99 and for the price, it is certainly feature packed.  For those who may not recall what exactly Project Tango is from Google, it is devices and apps that work in augmented reality.  These apps and now the Phab 2 Pro allow you to do thing like measure distances, fly through the solar system and other things all from the device.  A good example is the Lowe’s Vision app for Tango. It allows you to measure a space in your house and virtually put an appliance or other furniture you buy from Lowes in your house.

As for the Phab 2 Pro, you are getting a lot of horsepower in the package from Lenovo, starting with the 6.4″ display that renders 2560 x 1440.  Coupled with this is the Snapdragon 652 octa-core process running at 1.8GHz.

Google’s SMS & MMS app, Google Messenger, has had a nice update this week that brings a lot of visual tweaks as well as some new features.  The new build is version 2.0 and it is rolling out now in the Google Play Store.  The most immediate thing you will notice is the new round icon for the app, fitting in nicely with the look of the Google Pixel launcher on the Pixel devices.  That new icon also can now show unread message counts, ala iOS, which is something that Android frankly has needed for a long time.  But get this:  It doesn’t work on the new Pixel Launcher or the Google Now Launcher.

Insert head scratching here.

The Chromium team has rolled out an update to Chrome for Windows that should bring a big speed boost to the browser.  In build 53 for 32-bit and 54 for 64-bit, Chrome now takes advantage of Profile Guided Optimization, or PGO (pronounced Pogo) compiling to give big speed improvements.  In their blog post about the update, the team reports that new tabs open 14.8% faster while Page Loads speed up by 5.9%.  Not familiar with PGO?  It is a compiler optimization technique that is designed to optimize performance.  Specifically, Chrome looks at what functions are being used and optimizes those functions to gain the speed improvements.  Essentially what it does is move rarely used functions out of memory and frequently used ones into memory.