Microsoft has made Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) available
in Beta 2 preview form to web developers and IT professionals for
compatibility testing. So what should an IT department do about
implementing IE7 in its company?
This, like so many Microsoft releases, depends on your
experience. I have found that early adoption should be restricted
to some form of research and development, until the inevitable
teething problems are resolved. To illustrate my point, an
independent researcher needed just 15 minutes to find the first bug
in the Beta 2 preview release of IE7.
IE7 will be available as a stand-alone product for Windows XP
Service Pack 2 (SP2), and an enhanced version will form part of
Windows Vista. Microsoft says IE7 has been designed, and new
features added, to focus on three main areas - security,
manageability and ease of use.
It could be argued that some of the new features in IE7 are
actually just bug fixes, for example the enhanced URL parsing.
Currently, a hacker relies on a user clicking on an HTML link
containing odd or excessive characters. In the process of parsing
the URL, the system's buffer would overflow and execute the code
the hacker wanted to install.
Other features, such as tabbed browsing (which allows you to
open multiple web pages in a single browser window, and quickly
flip back and forth), integrated built-in search bar, and private
data clearing from a single button, appear to be IE7 simply playing
catch-up with other browsers, for example Firefox v1.5.
However, some of the new features are welcome, especially URL
display protection. This includes a mandatory address bar in every
window, and support for Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) - which
prevents bogus websites from using characters in other languages
that resemble each other, for example "a" in English and "a" in
Cyrillic.
Other new features include centralised control over Active
Directory Group Policy (ADGP), which makes browser management
easier and helps administrators ensure users comply with company
standards; improved support for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
(AJAX) - IE7 exposes XMLHTTP natively, which improves syntactical
compatibility across different browsers; and changes to how web
pages are printed - removing that annoying problem of content being
cut off at the left or right margin.
Overall, IE7 looks like a move in the right direction and does
improve security, manageability, and ease of use. I would recommend
IT departments evaluate IE7 Beta 2, because according to Microsoft,
the product will be on general availability from the second half of
2006, and will be embedded in Windows Vista, which is expected
around the same time.
Roy Illsley is senior research analyst at the Butler
Group