Microsoft had been rigorously testing Internet Explorer 7 over the past 18 months, releasing five beta versions before stealthily unveiling the full-consumer version late last night.
The five years between IE updates has been damaging for Microsoft. The software giant’s browser has lost ground each year to open source Mozilla Firefox, and recent studies from WebSideStory and Jupiter research have shown that IE has fallen to its lowest-ever market share.
To recapture some of its past glory, the new version of IE has added support for Web standards, RSS/XML feeds and tabbed browsing. The new browser also offers protection against phishing sites.
“They basically just brought it up-to-date and brought it back to the current state of the art,” Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. “A lot of the features are meant to appeal to more savvy users who switched to Firefox or are experimenting with other browsers. So this may help Microsoft gain some market share back.”
Under the hood, IE 7 supports Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and XMLHTTP for dynamically retrieved data. Additionally, IE 7 runs in protected mode that isolates the program and eliminates the ability for data to be written on disk, cutting down on malicious code passing through the browser.
Internet Explorer 7 is available for free download on Microsoft’s homepage.