Microsoft's Big Surprise Announcement

Bill Gates shocked the tech world yesterday by reversing a longstanding Microsoft policy. Microsoft will ship an update to its Internet Explorer browser separately from the next major version of Windows. Gates made the surprise announcement at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

A test version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer. The company had previously said that it would not ship a new IE version before the next major update to Windows, code-named Longhorn, which is scheduled to arrive sometime next year.

In announcing the plan, Gates acknowledged something that many outside the company had been arguing for some time, that the browser itself has become a security risk.

The bad news for some of us is that the new browser will only work on machines running on Windows XP Service Pack 2, a security-focused update to the operating system that the company launched last summer. It has not been decided whether IE 7 will come with a different Windows update, such as a security revamp.

As recently as August, Microsoft said that no new stand-alone version was planned before Longhorn, and the company reiterated back then that its plan was to make new IE features available with major Windows releases.

Microsoft's decision to announce plans for IE 7 at a security conference was no coincidence. IE 6's security reputation has suffered over the years, dogged by a long string of security bugs, phishing schemes and patches. The company sought to allay security concerns last year by issuing the SP2 update for Windows XP, which included a number of changes to browser security.

But critics complained that the update would benefit only those people who either already owned XP or who had paid for an operating system upgrade, leaving about half the Windows world out in the cold.

There is a great deal of speculation that the success of Firefox has driven Microsoft to change its policy. I am sure that there is some truth to that. It will be interesting to see if the new IE will bring back users from Firefox...or will Firefox keep growing.