Upgrading Your Microsoft Tools

I noticed a big advertisement campaign by Microsoft on the Yahoo Portal lately, to upgrade to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Browser. It's somewhat self-serving, as the IE browser you get comes fully-loaded with customized Yahoo tools and links. However, it's a good idea. The frequency of patch updates and time on the market continues to make older versions of IE a pain to update, and still somewhat vulnerable to intrusions and security exploits. The new IE 7 has many great and updated security features; if you also take advantage of Microsoft's automated update feature, you're browsing will be much easier to secure and protect. Paired with an updated operating system (Microsoft Vista), Internet Safety should become much easier to deal with...though will never be a passive activity. You must continue all other safety and privacy measures, including firewalls, anti-virus, monitoring and good common sense.

While IE 7 is a great step in the right direction, I would still advise using either the Firefox or Opera browsers instead; these have a good track record of stability, safety, immunity to hacking and have many of the features IE 7 only now is releasing.