Internet Explorer 7 Notable Security Features

As Microsoft being more conscious about security on the development of their software much security improvements were expected at the release of their next version of Internet Explorer browser, which is Windows Internet Explorer 7, released late in 2006 as beta version for windows XP operating system, and the browser by default on windows vista.

One of the biggest changes I find on windows Internet explorer 7 is the fact that Internet explorer is not tightly integrated with the operating system anymore, thus Microsoft breaks the tradition from most than 10 years of shipping their operating systems with Internet explorer tightly integrated with the Windows Shell. The rendering engine and security framework has been reworked also, partly as result of security enhancements.

Windows Internet Explorer 7 operates in a special protected mode feature by default on windows vista, which makes the browser run with even lower privileges than a normal user on a computer (not an administrator) and has no access to the operating system or any other directory rather than temporary internet file folder. Another notable improvement in IE7 is the way ActiveX controls run on your computer, as many of you might know, ActiveX controls are probably one of the most insecure technologies ever created, and has been used to litter every windows system, from toolbars, plug-ins etc. which some of them do nothing but hurt your computer.

In previous Internet explorer versions, Microsoft didn’t differentiate between ActiveX controls that were designed expressly for the web, like Adobe flash and adobe reader add-ons and those that were designed only to run locally on the PC. With Internet Explorer 7, a new featured called Active Opt-in automatically disables entire classes of ActiveX controls, including those that were not designed specifically for use over the Internet. Now when you visit a website that tries to activate an ActiveX control on your system, the Internet explorer information bar prompts you so you can decide to proceed or not.

There are a lot of good new features on Internet Explorer 7, the ones I find more useful are the following;

Tabbed Browsing: a Quick Tabs feature is also available
A search box: located at the top right corner, the search box supports searching on any search engine you specify.
An integrated feed reader: readers can ready RSS or Atom feeds
Improvements to CSS, DOM, and HTML support have been made.
A Page Zoom Option: sitting at the bottom-right corner. Unlike zooming just the text size of a webpage, this feature will zoom the complete content of a webpage.
A Phishing Filter: a protection against phishing scams and other websites that may be considered dangerous for users to enter their persona information into.
Fix My Settings: if the current settings are unsafe it notifies the user, the user can also press a button in order to reset internet explorer to its default settings.

All these features and security improvements probably make IE7 the most secure browser ever released by Microsoft. Even though is not perfect yet, as all software there are always vulnerabilities, but it was a good deed from Microsoft to reconstruct and implement better security on Internet explorer. Hopefully hackers will stop using Internet explorer to break into computers, or at least make it harder for them to break in.