By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, October 29, 2006

Your view of the Web is in for a change -- in some cases, whether you like it or not.

This can happen with either of two new browsers. One's the second major update to Mozilla Firefox in a year. The other is more of a surprise: It comes from the company that sat out the last half decade of browser innovation, Microsoft. And it will be automatically installed on Windows XP machines starting next week.

Don't be alarmed. If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, much less any older version, you need this upgrade. You've been stuck with a browser that lends you too little help in staying on top of the Web, and out of trouble on it.

Competing browsers, such as Firefox, Opera and Safari, have provided solutions for those problems for years. As a result, Firefox in particular has carved a chunk out of IE's once-overwhelming market share.

But some users can't or won't make the effort to download and install new software. So now Microsoft will do it for them. Starting Wednesday, its new, Windows XP-only Internet Explorer 7 ( http://www.microsoft.com/ie ) will be automatically installed on their computers through XP's Windows Update mechanism. (The one exception: An illegitimate copy of XP that fails Microsoft's "validation" test can't get this version of IE.)

Microsoft's mandatory upgrade is a gutsy, perhaps pushy move. Unlike almost every other patch or bug-fix sent through Windows Update, IE 7 brings major new features and a new front end. This update forcefully yanks an obsolete browser into the 21st century -- which may confuse some IE vets.

Users of other browsers, however, may feel right at home. Like them, IE 7 offers tabbed browsing, which cures screen gridlock by letting you view multiple Web pages in one window, and a search shortcut at the top right that sends a query to your choice of search engines. It also can subscribe to free Web feeds, which spare your keyboard's refresh key by letting Web sites tell you when they've posted new items.

Microsoft has made its own tweaks to these borrowed features. For example, if you've opened so many pages in tabs that you're getting lost, clicking a "Quick Tabs" button fills the window with miniature views of each open page. And when you preview a Web feed by clicking on an orange icon in IE 7's toolbar, a little search form lets you peek into its archives to see how often a topic of interest has been covered.

Internet Explorer 7 can also look out for "phishing" sites, the phony pages that impersonate banks and credit card issuers: If desired, it will check every new page against a blacklist of known phishing offenders, then block your access to any site on it. Meanwhile, IE 7 highlights legitimate financial sites that use encryption to keep out online snoops by putting a big lock icon in the address bar.

(It's a sad comment on the state of the Web these days that a browser's selling point can be how well it bars you from parts of the Web.)

IE 7 adds further defenses against browser hijacking -- attempts by sites to force-feed your computer hostile software by exploiting flaws in the browser. But since it continues to support one of the most popular hijacking targets, Microsoft's ActiveX technology, it still presents a bigger target than other browsers.

The Web may look a little sharper overall in this browser, thanks to its improved support for Web standards. And when you print pages, IE automatically resizes them so they don't get cropped at the sides. You can also resize a page on the screen by clicking on a magnifying glass icon.

But none of those features will be as immediately noticed as IE 7's new interface. This browser, like many recent Microsoft releases, ditches traditional text menus in favor of toolbar buttons that sometimes double as drop-down menus. This sleek design takes up much less space, but it also lacks consistency and bumps some often-used functions, like the home-page button, to odd locations.

In any case, if you've been using IE 6 for years, you may not know where to click when IE 7 lands on your computer.

But rebelling against this forced upgrade by turning off automatic updates in XP is not a good idea. You need Microsoft's security fixes far more than you need to avoid disruption from a new browser. Besides, you can better express any disapproval by switching to the new Firefox 2 (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X 10.2 or newer and Linux at http://www.mozilla.com/ ).

This free, open-source browser, used by a growing minority of users, may once have had the reputation of being a cult favorite among geeks, but compared with IE 7, it's a much easier upgrade. Its interface features a lineup of menus and toolbars that any IE user would recognize, but it also offers all the power-browsing features that IE 7 has added -- and then some.

For instance, if you close a tab by mistake, Firefox lets you undo it to bring that page back up. Its Web-search form allows some search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to complete search terms for you, based on what other users have looked for. Firefox allows a choice of RSS-feed readers, both other programs and such sites as Google Reader or Bloglines. Like Microsoft's new browser, Firefox includes a phishing filter -- although it missed a couple of phishing sites that IE 7 flagged.

Firefox 2.0 can also spell-check what you type into Web forms. And if the browser shuts down accidentally (as it did when my laptop crashed with a "blue screen of death" Thursday night), it will restart where you left off, with the same set of pages you had open before.

That capability alone makes Firefox 2 worth the upgrade.

Firefox also fits better for an often-overlooked group of users -- everybody still running pre-XP versions of Windows. By releasing IE 7 only for XP, Microsoft has given them the clearest signal possible: Goodbye and good luck.

This can be a lot of change to deal with for people who haven't had to adjust to a new browser in this decade. But it should be welcomed. It's called competition, and it's about time it returned to the browser market.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.