Yesterday, Microsoft released a refreshed build of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows xp that no longer requires WGA check. If you're wondering why Microsoft decided to do it or why now? Mary Jo Foley has pretty much nailed it.

It's obvious that it's in Microsoft's best interests to let pirates install IE 7 more easily (not that it was impossible) to improve its market share rather than let Firefox gain over it due restrictions enforced by Microsoft itself.

So all you pirates out there, if you weren't able to download IE7 for obvious reasons. Get it now!

I thought this would be so easy to find, a simple search for "Backup IE 7 Search Providers"  on Google would fetch me the answer. But no sir, I found no such thing! I even did a search on Microsoft and even the Knowledge Base but didn't find what I was looking for. The one page that did help me find the solution has an altogether different title.

Well the good news is that; it is really easy!

Simply backup the following registry key and you're done.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes

Internet Explorer - love it or hate it. But there's one thing that you can't do; is ignore it, especially if you're a web developer. A large number of php programmers I know or have interacted with; who know about and use the Web Developer Toolbar on Firefox aren't aware of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Not that all php developers don't know of Microsoft's offering for Internet Explorer, many developers ridicule Microsoft for bringing it out rather too late, but what they probably don't know is that there's been at least one developer toolbar available for Internet Explorer for 2 years before Microsoft released the Developer Toolbar. DebugBar by French company Core Services has been available for the Internet Explorer since September 2003. Although it is not free to use in a production scenario, I recommend giving it a try.

And if that is a fine start, the one thing where Microsoft disappointed on Internet Explorer 7 was the lack of inline page search. Come to think of it, when you look at the whole focus on instant search in Windows Vista the archaic find dialog of IE 7 just doesn't fit. Unless you are an avid Maxthon fan like me this kind of stuff wouldn't bother you, but those of you who use IE more than they use any other browser, I recommend using either Inline Search by Core Services or Find As You Type which even comes with the souce code if you're interested. The best thing about these plugins is that you don't need to be using IE 7 as they work on IE versions 5+.

Now! If you thought that Firefox 2 has this cool spellcheck feature that has made IE 7 stale, even before it got released, you should check out IESpell.com this plugin has been available for Internet Explorer since 2002. That's right for 4 long years now.

Next up is Bayden IEToys by Bayden Systems which bring a multitude of goodies in one small installation package, it's the equivalent of the Windows xp PowerToys. As it brings to you, dictionary & encyclopedia lookup (of course Wikipedia), HTML source of selected portion (equivalent of the Firefox's View Selection Source) - another goodie for web developers, ImageList to see and copy any/all the images from the current webpage, a highlighter to save you the trouble of highlighting the text after you take your printouts, and this one's my favorite - inspired from Opera: Linkify select any non- anchor or malformed url and rightclick to open it without bothering to copy-paste. It also features Google and MSN contextual search feature which can save you time sometimes

A few hours ago Steven Bink posted on his website that Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 build 5299 for Windows xp SP2 was leaked on the world wide web quoting this from jcxp.net.

There's a new thing that Microsoft is trying to do with this build; that is disallow installation of IE7 if their copy of Windows fails the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation. I don't know how much successful will it be as there's a patch already available on jcxp.net for the current build. And something tells me so will be the case when the Public Preview is released next month.

I have been testing out Windows Live™ Mail (Beta) for almost 2 months, yes when it was known only as Mail Beta! I have to say I was drooling over the new features when I first got the chance to experience them. Especially the drag & drop support (handy for organizing emails or deleting them). And though sure there are a lot of annoying bugs (like when a "fixed width" HTML email gets clipped from the right ). I have to say that web mail suddenly has become appealing again. The only appeal of Gmail to me was that they were offering POP/SMTP for free, the space thing is a bit too overrated (in my humble opinion) think about it you have a 200 GB hard disk would you really care about the size of your POP account. Though I would like to acknowledge the fact that it is because of GMail that we are able to see increase in attachment limits of all the providers, besides the obvious; newer developments in the form of betas by Microsoft & Yahoo!

Anyways back to Windows Live™ Mail, since the new beta has seen changes in its domain from the earlier start.com to live.com and my Internet Explorer settings are pretty high, as I do use it for browsing purposes (and No! I do not use an Anti Virus program, why? May be I should state that outside this post.) Since I have enabled warning while switching from one zone to another I keep getting warnings when I'm browsing a site in my trusted zone (say passport.net) which contains content from a site from the internet zone, like start.com or live.com (until you add them in the secured zone). Then I realized that it would be really nice if you could add a site to one of the zones when you're prompted with a similar warning sign in IE7. And it would be really great to see the ability to define your own zones in which you could disable combination of various elements like images, Javascript, ActiveX. This can go a long way in allowing the user to define their own level of protection!