Internet Explorer 7 public beta is closed for now

Internet Explorer 7 public beta is closed for now

The public beta of the upcoming update to the Internet Explorer web browser is closed for now. Microsoft now plans to release another updated beta of Internet Explorer 7 in public within the next four months. The news was updated on the Internet Explorer Blog by the general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, Dean Hachomovitch.

The next public beta is expected to be released before March 2006 and should give the testers a preview of the things to be made available in the final version expected to be out next year. Hachomovitch wrote in the Blog post: “We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to try a pre-release version of IE7 and tell us how it works with their Web sites, their applications, their add-ons, and how they use the Web overall.”

For now, the latest pre-release version of IE7 is only available to a private group of beta testers. The Blog post also talked about how Microsoft is changing the way Internet Explorer handles ’security zones’. These new updates would let the user set security levels depending on the perceived trustworthiness of a Web site.

The post further added: “We realized that the intranet zone — and its lower restrictions — is not relevant at all to the typical home user running IE. One of our interns this summer, Robert Liao, changed IE’s logic so that a Windows machine that is not on a managed corporate network will treat apparent Intranet sites as Internet. This change effectively removes the attack surface of the intranet zone for home PC use.”