I recently upgraded my Internet Explorer 6.0 to Internet Explorer 7.0. I had run the Beta for IE7.0 some time back in June / July when it was released initially. From my experience then versus what I am having now, I must say, IE7.0 has made great improvements. This I am sure is old news as many people must have used and found out the great new features that have been included in IE7.0 by Microsoft, like tabbed browsing.

That was already present in earlier version of Firefox and even prior to Firefox, Firebird had the same features. Nothing great about it. Given the recent focus on cybercrime and identity theft, Microsoft has strengthened its website identification filters and mechanisms. Take for example the webpage shown in the adjacent figure. This is an internal website for me working on https protocol. However, the certificate issued to this website is issued by an internal certificate authority which is not verifiable for the browser. I know that this is a secure website and can be trusted, but since the browser cannot / does not know that, it does not let me on the website to start with. Instead of a pop-up which no one reads and click OK, Accept or whatever is there, it showed me a web page that told me that there is problem with the certificate of the website and it may not be safe to proceed. It gives two option:

1. Close the webpage or
2. Ignore the warning and proceed to the website (not recommended.

Since I trusted this website, I clicked on Continue. But still IE7.0 did not trust it and continued to remind me by painting the tool bar in Red (Maybe pink) and giving a small window which says Certificate Error. I can then click on the window to get more details. I liked this feature that continuously reminds me that IE7.0 does not trust the particular site.

Firefox also has similar feature which pops up a message which says that the certificate issuer is not trusted and cannot be verified. On clicking OK, it gives another notification that the site I am trying to establish connection is different than to which this particular certificate was issued to. On clicking OK, it allows me to visit the website but forgets that this was a website with certificate from a non-trusted certificate authority.

So all in all, one browser has one great feature and the other browser has other. I would like to see both the features in a single browser.

1. The ability of the browser to remind me continuously that the site is untrusted.
2. The ability of browser to detect and notify me that the certificate issued to name and the actual websites are different.

Both the features together will make a secure browsing environment