Forget the desktop; the browser is quickly becoming the next battleground in the fight against malware. Google’s acquisition this week of Postini got more attention, but its May purchase of browser virtualization vendor GreenBorder Technologies may prove to be just as important in the long run. With more applications–and malware–running directly on the Web now, securing the browsing experience is more important than its ever been. The little SSL lock in the corner of the window isn’t enough anymore. Enterprise and home users alike are looking for comprehensive protection from phishing, malware hosted on legitimate sites and drive-by downloads.

This picture is coming into sharper focus with the launch this week of Haute Secure, a start-up whose namesake offering can prevent malware from loading on protected PCs and also can stop users from loading malicious Web sites. The plug-in only works with Internet Explorer right now–not surprising given that the four founders are all former Microsoft employees–but support for Firefox is in the works. Haute Secure’s slickest feature is that it grows smarter as more users install it. As it encounters malicious sites, the program adds them to a central database of known bad URLs and can then stop other users from visiting those sites in the future. And, as the folks at TechCrunch point out, Haute Secure analyzes each page individually, not just an entire site, which can make for more accurate security assessments.

Google’s GreenBorder technology is quite different from Haute Secure, essentially running all Web sessions in a sandbox, thus protecting the core OS from any malware and then trashing all of the content at the end of each session. Regardless of the approach, however, the end goal of protecting users from all of the tripe they encounter on the Web these days is the same. A key question is how Microsoft, proud owner of a large portion of the browser market, will react to all of this. The company has built a number of new security mechanisms into IE 7, including a phishing filter and other protections. But, if four guys from Redmond thought there was still room for more security in the browsing experience, Microsoft clearly has some additional work to do.

Technorati Tags: Haute+Secure, SSL, Microsoft+security, Greenborder