Interesting Microshaft was not planning on doing another IE until
their next OS came out, but I guess Firefox is making them nervous.
thanks Mozilla if your browser would work well on my machine I would
switch. I guess you non-xp users are out of luck! -- MZ

Microsoft is updating its Internet Explorer browser, building its
Windows AntiSpyware Beta tool free with it, according to remarks by
Bill Gates, the software giant's chairman at a security conference in
San Fransisco.

"We have a dialogue to make sure that we're understanding exactly what
people would like to have us do in Internet Explorer, and what we've
decided to do is a new version of Internet Explorer, this is IE 7, and
it adds a new level of security," said Gates.

 
He said that the beta version of IE 7 would be out by "early in the
summer". It will be available to users of Windows XP SP2. Microsoft
will also be including these capabilities in the next release of
Windows scheduled for 2006, named "Longhorn".

"We decided we're going to have the new capabilities even available
before having the Windows license to the install base here. Some of
the advances include things focused on phishing, where people use URLs
that appear to come from another location, things related to malware.
So, it will be another important advance here," Gates is reported to
have remarked according to transcripts on the Microsoft site.

Internet Explorer 6.0, SP 2 had such capabilities as zone and domain
restriction, anti-spoofing capabilities, blocking suspicious content
and memory protection.

Gates said there were 59 "checkpoints continuously working in the
background to improve my Internet browsing safety".

Gates demonstrated through a presentation at the conference how the
AntiSpyware worked in IE: A red pop-up appears telling the user that a
plug-in has been detected, along with a description that it's trying
to insert itself in the start-up portion of the registry, a. "common
trick used by spyware that gets started every time I start my
computer". Users get the ability to customize types of pop-ups they
see, and how often that they see them.

"We're also going to dialogue about what more can we do, because
browsing definitely is a point of vulnerability. Allowing people to
have the richness and the extensibility, and yet be protected, that's
a challenge. You don't want to lock things down so you can't ever get
to rich Web sites, and yet you still want to make sure this is not the
path that security threats are coming in through," remarked Gates.

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