IE7 to arrive within next two weeks
Microsoft has announced that the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, IE7, will be available to users within the next two weeks.
Attendees of the Digital Life exhibition in New York were told that IE7 should be rolled out by 27 October, confirming information posted on the Internet Explorer blog last week that it was due some time before the end of this month.
There had been rumours earlier in the week that it was to be one of the updates distributed to customers on this month's 'Patch Tuesday', a day that Microsoft traditionally uses to send out security fixes to its Windows operating systems and other software applications.
Indeed, Microsoft did initially plan 11 updates for that day but only released ten of them, stating that one had failed to come up to scratch.
IE7 will be distributed to customers as an automatic update, and will be built into Microsoft's forthcoming operating system, Windows Vista. Offering features such as tabbed browsing and a built-in anti-phishing filter, IE7 also offers what Microsoft is calling a 'protected mode'.
Protected mode, says Microsoft, is an "important step forward in security for Internet Explorer". It will only be available in the Windows Vista version of IE7 and according to Microsoft it "significantly reduces the ability of an attack to write, alter or destroy data on the user's machine or to install malicious code."