Spam used to just a nuisance. A little bit of junk email here and there. Hit delete and forget it. Now it is turning into a major headache. Some spam contains viruses. A lot is just plain fraud. The fraud ranges from spam proporting to be from your bank asking you to click a fake link to supply your net banking login and password, to the Nigerian scams, to advertising products that have doubtful claims.

Internet Explorer 7 marks the first major update to Internet Explorer in several years. Explorer 6 has been a bane to us as a web developer. We've been forced to compromise a standards compliant design in order to accommodate an aging browser. IE7 marks some considerable improvements

First off is tabbed browsing. Here, Explorer is playing catch up to Firefox which in turn borrowed from the underrated browser, Opera.

The new IE gets a big tick for the zoom feature which allows users to zoom in on web pages. This is along overdue feature, if you ignore the fact Opera has had that feature for a while.

IE has also enhanced security considerably. Like the new Firefox, it warns of cross browser scripts.

IE 7 has improved it's adherence to web standards. It does a better job than IE6 which plagued designers with a annoyances like the peekaboo bug. IE7 renders this site properly- just like Firefox. However it is not quite there. See how IE handles pure CSS drop down menus at http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html IE6 changes the colour when you hover a mouse over it. IE7 shows the menus, but it's a mirage; you can never get to the menus that expand out. Load the
same page in Firefox and you'll see how a pure CSS menu should work.

IE7 requires you to reboot your computer unlike Firefox. That suggests to us that IE7 is tied into the operating system. You won't get IE7 on a Mac or Linux like Firefox or Opera. IE7 still has a way to go to meet web standards but we think it a considerable improvement and a worthwhile upgrade, but we'll still recommend Firefox or Opera over it.

We've been testing some of the new crop of web browsers lately. The results seem to be point one way... Firefox.

In case you haven't heard, Firefox is a stand alone web brower that is part of the Mozilla stable. It has a number of advantages over the dominant Internet Explorer:

1. Cross Platform: Firefox come in various flavours adapted for variou operating systems.
2. Small Download: The Windows version is about 4.7meg which is almost a 10th of the size of Internet Explorer 6. The Linux and OSX versions are larger, weighing in at 8.1meg and 8.6meg respectively
3. Speed: Firefox seems to load web pages faster than Explorer.
4. Tabbed Browsing: One of our favourite features is tabbed browsing. It's nice and easy having various windows all open in the same place. You can have multiple pages open without cluttering your desktop.
5. Popup Blocking: One of the most annoying features of surfing the web thes days would have to be popups. Explore can block popups with 3rd party software but Firefox has a popup blocking feature as a standard.
6. Security: Firefox doesn't run ActiveX commands so you are less likely to be plagued by spyware
7. User Selected Stylesheets: If a website has multiple style sheets, Firefox enables you to swap easily by clicking an icon in the bottom left.
8. Standards Support: Firefox fully supports all the latest web standard like XHTML, Cascading stylesheets etc. It's wont chuck a "hissy fi"t if it comes across an XML page.
9. Easy Switching: Firefox can easily import your favourites from Explorer.
10. Free: Yes, Firefox is free. It costs nothing and is based on open source.

At present, Explorer seems to be falling further behind. Explorer 6 is now around 2 years old which is a long time in internet years. Firefox offers some very stiff competition and some compelling reasons to switch.

In a historic move, AOL has announced the end of the line for Netscape. Support for the browser will cease from the 1st of Feb, 2008.

The nature of the computer virus has changed over the years. It used to be that the humble floppy disk was the vector for transmission. Now that has changed . The number one vector is email.