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Phishing sucks (if you're not familiar with the term you can find some details here). It has just always really ticked me off that there are people out there that feel that they somehow have the right to just take something from me that I've worked hard to earn. Not only that, some of them will work harder at figuring out ways to steal my money than they would need to work to make their own. Just go get a job, creep!

So believe me, I am all on board for any technology that will thwart (or at least slow down) these morons. One of the best ways (besides educating the end user) would be to create a database that would hold the URL's of the offending sites, then to have the browser warn folks when they are about to enter a known phishing site. The key to getting this to work would be to get any new phishing sites added to the list ASAP, as these bogus sites are usually only active for a day or so, sometimes only for a couple of hours. This means that you would need to provide an easy means for allowing your average good Samaritan to tell you when they've come across a phishing site, so that it could be verified and added pronto. Sound hard? Maybe, unless you've got the resources of Microsoft and are about to release a new browser to the world.

In as much as website developers spend an exorbitant amount of time complaining about them, modern day web browsers are actually remarkable pieces of software. It wasn't that terribly long ago that the entire concept of a software program that was capable of interacting with a wide variety of computers and operating systems was completely revolutionary, the 'holy grail' of software development. Granted, this magic takes more than just a browser to achieve, but I have to admit there are times when I am just amazed that it actually works. This could just be the programmer in me, because I know what it takes to actually get things to work (I think sometimes that programmers are the people that are the most surprised when software programs actually work).

Anyway, one thing that every programmer understands is that the average user has an undeniable need for speed when it comes to interacting with their computer. Time is measured in fractions of seconds, and the longer the user has to wait for their computer to respond to their request the more likely they are to be dissatisfied with whatever piece of software they are using, and with the computer in general. This can become a difficult challenge, especially for browser programmers that have to overcome variables that are not within their control. A very important one of which is the user's connection speed to the internet.

In a perfect world we would all have blazing broadband connections to the internet, but this isn't a perfect world and not all of us have that luxury. In order to compensate for this the writers of browser software use some tricks to make your connection appear to be faster than it really is. One of these tricks is to take some of the information on the web page that you're currently looking at, and to store that information locally on your computer's hard drive. That way the next time you look at that same web page your computer can pull those pieces of information (primarily images) from your computer's hard drive, instead of needing to once again download them from the internet using your painfully slow modem. While this is generally a really good idea, there are a couple of unfortunate side effects from doing this.

I know that Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview has been out for awhile, but I just got around to installing it and I thought I would take her for a little test drive. I'll include the relevant links at the bottom of the post, but before you rush out and install it remember that this is a beta preview, so at this stage it can still be tough to tell the difference between the bugs and the features. According to Microsoft this preview will only load on computers running Windows XP with service pack 2 installed, although they say that the production version will run on Vista (the next OS due out later this year), Windows XP Pro x64, and Windows Server 2003 in addition to XP. It's not going to run on anything prior to XP with service pack 2, so you may be looking at an OS upgrade if you've got an older OS.

I think that it's easy to tell from looking at it that Microsoft has heard the footsteps of other browsers coming up from behind, and has tried to take the best features from some of those other browsers and incorporate them into this version. Some of what they've done will be old hat for users of the more advanced browsers, but it looks like they're trying out some new things, too. They get an advantage with the hooks they can build into the OS, and they've already got the installed base. They flip the switch on it and they instantly get market dominance, it's a good place to be. Still, it's good to see that some good old-fashioned healthy competition can make the giant jump.

So, you've seen these funny looking icons all over the place and you're thinking you're the only one that doesn't know what they do. Then you make the mistake of actually clicking on one, and you get a very nasty looking webpage that looks like this: