I had the oppertunity to sit down with Dave Massy of the Internet Explorer 7 team (see his blog here) in Redmond earlier in the week and talk a little about whats coming in IE7.

He also gave me a really cool IE logo wristband

The main point that was made was security, security, security — Microsoft is taking this very seriously after lots of customer feedback about IE 6 and IE 6 SP1. Some of the features introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2 helped the issue of browser security a bit, but Internet Explorer 7 combined with the new security features of Windows Vista will take internet security to a new level.

IE 7 running natively on Windows Vista runs in a special, isolated, restricted mode where malware would have a hell of a time doing anything to the system. In this special mode even the registry is emulated, so any changes made wouldn’t really harm the system.

Dave will be at the Mix 06 conference in Las Vegas next week, for updates on that and IE 7, check out the IEBlog.

Oh, and *cough* get your caffienated beverages ready for next week folks… 😉

– Patrick Elliott