"Longhorn" won't make its first appearance until the end of next year at the earliest, but with enterprises demanding better security tools, Microsoft Corp. is not waiting for the next version of Windows to ship before it makes changes to improve the security of some key components such as Internet Explorer, which will see a significant security upgrade in its next release.
"We made the decision that the things we were doing wouldn't just be in Longhorn and that we needed to get them into the hands of the current installed base as well. IE 7 is down-level to [Windows] XP, even though somewhat of a superset of it is the browser in Longhorn," said Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in an interview at WinHEC here last week.
In Longhorn, IE will run in its own protected space, thus isolating it from other parts of the operating system.
|