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According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer accounted for 79.6% of all browsers used in December 2006, a drop from the 80.6% during the previous month. Firefox's use, meanwhile, measured 14% in December, up from 13.5% in November. Also gaining ground in the last month of 2006 was Apple's Safari, which climbed to 4.2% from 4%, and Opera, which saw its share increase from 0.7% to 0.9%. Net Applications' data put IE 7's market share during December at 18.3%, up dramatically from November's 8.8%. But IE 6 lost more than IE 7 gained, dropping from 70.9% in November to 60.7% the next month. The gain in IE 7 is largely due to Microsoft pushing the new browser to end users via Windows' Automatic Updates setting, which is usually reserved for downloading and installing security fixes on PCs. Microsoft began issuing IE 7 to Windows XP users through Automatic Updates in early November as part of a controversial scheme to get the new browser in as many hands as possible as quickly as possible.

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The browser flaw could affect users who visit a trusted site by opening a pop-up window in that site but containing malicious code. This is the second IE 7 flaw that has been discovered since Microsoft released the browser two weeks ago. Last week, a security flaw was discovered in IE 7 that could spoof the address of a pop-up window. The two IE 7 flaws, if used in conjunction with each other, can easily dupe all but the most security-minded users, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer of security company Secunia, which discovered the flaws.

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Hello, my name is Kellie, I am a Lead Program Manager on the IE Team. First and foremost, the IE team would like to thank everyone in the community who contributed feedback to the IE7 release. You guys rock! This release was the first time we used the Microsoft Connect site to collect feedback for the public beta. We learned a lot of lessons from this feedback program, and we intend to make it better next time around. We received an overwhelming response from you and your efforts provided great ideas and drove important bug fixes. IE7 is now live, but this is not the end… The IE team is looking forward to the next version, and we are dedicated to listening to your ideas in the next beta release. We appreciate your support!

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Malicious hackers typically embed scripts on Web sites and then use social engineering techniques to trick unsuspecting visitors into downloading Trojans, bots, spyware programs and other harmful forms of malware. With BrowserShield, Wang argues, many such attacks could be blocked. BrowserShield can be used as a framework that rewrites HTML pages to deny any attempt at executing harmful code on browsers. "We basically intercept the Web page, inject our logic and transform the page that is eventually rendered on the browser," Wang said. "We're inserting our layer of code at run-time to make the Web page safe for the end user."

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A release candidate is fundamentally different from a beta. With the exception of a very short list of issues we're aware of and working on, we think the product is done. We're looking to enthusiasts, developers, and IT Pros to tell us if this build has any critical, must-fix before we ship issues. The real world is much richer than our test environment and I appreciate the feedback that has helped us make the product better.

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IE 7 will be delivered in the fourth quarter as a "high priority" update via Automatic Updates in Windows XP, Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of IE product management, said in an interview Tuesday. Automatic Updates is a Windows feature typically used for security updates, but Microsoft has also used it to push its antipiracy tool WGA Notifications. "The justification, of course, is the significant security enhancements in IE 7," Schare said. Microsoft recommends that all Windows users install the new browser when it ships, he added.

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Internet Explorer users who visited a Web page containing this ad and whose IE was not equipped with the WMF patch would not get that warning. Rather, their machines would silently download a Trojan horse program that installs junk software in the PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware. This stuff bombards the user with pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage. Only a little more than half of the anti-virus programs used at anti-virus testing service AV-Test.org flagged the various programs that the Trojan tried to download as malicious or suspicious.