I’ve recently upgraded my browser to IE7 – and admittedly, it’s made my browsing experience much more manageable and less worrying (for now). Actually, I wasn’t really interested in upgrading until the other day, when one of the websites I opened suddenly spewed popup messages about a certain DriveCleaner software attempting to scan my computer. Said software offered to scan my computer and remove all traces of adult porn sites that I’ve visited. What porn sites? Hello? Good thing that my Symantec antivirus automatically detected it as a security risk and promptly quarantined the malicious software.

Back to IE7. Here are some of the reasons why users would benefit by upgrading their IE version to 7: first off, streamlined interface. Gone are the menu bars including File, Edit, etc. Next is tabbed browsing – you’re gonna love tabbed browsing. With it, you can open multiple websites in a single window. Plus, it allows you to see thumbnail images of all open tabs in a single view! It is also possible to organize multiple tabs into a single tab group and save it as a favorite. Next, there is a new search box which you can customize – you can set a particular search engine (like Yahoo! or Google) to use when doing a search. It has made life much easier for me. I’ve been using Yahoo! toolbar for quite some time now, but since I am also using Google to do web searches, I had been contemplating on installing a Google toolbar as well. Well, now that I’ve installed IE7, I don’t need either toolbar anymore.

Other features which I haven’t tried yet, but are also incorporated into the current IE7 version: RSS feeds, automatically shrinking of text so all webpage content fits on your final printed page. And for those who are concerned about protection against malicious software, fraudulent websites and online phishing scams, IE7 has incorporated various tools against these. In IE7’s toolbar, you can set the popup blockers and phishing filters ON in order to protect yourself from these evils. In the Tools menu, you can see enable or disable add-ons for the browser. Imagine our surprise when in our home PC we found out that there is an eXact Advertising add-on in our IE browser, that has been making logs of all our search keywords without our knowledge! As to how we got that malicious software hacking into our browser, we could only guess. It has now been disabled, thanks to IE7.

Well there you have it. Need I say more? 🙂