“Socially engineering attacks like malware are a growing threat on the internet and are one of the most common risks to people’s safety online” wrote Microsoft’s James Pratt.

“We have got better and better at blocking malware through the SmartScreen Filter because we have continued to invest in our back end service since we released IE8 in March 2009″ said Pratt.

In the last two months, more than 100 million malware attempts have been blocked by Internet Explorer 8, 5 times as many as the same time last year, with more than 1.7 times the users.

The continued investment and development of malware protection is great for consumers, and helps keep their home PC’s safe.

Malware, also known as phishing (pronounced fishing), protection can also be found in other popular browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

The updated preview release includes support for the HTML5 video tag, canvas tag support and embedded fonts using the WOFF standard.

“The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest instalment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You’ll see more performance, same markup, and hardware accelerated HTML5″ wrote Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer.

This latest release performs well in benchmarks, now scoring 83/100 in the Acid3 test, up from 68/100 in the last platform preview. SunSpider testing shows the browser is almost on par with the recently released Safari 5, which our own testing confirmed.

Willing testers can check out the IE9 Platform Preview release from the Test Drive IE website.

Microsoft is still hard at work on Internet Explorer 9, and today provided an updated on how they are going with the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) web standards.

Latest results show that IE9 is now fully HTML5 standards compliant.

Microsoft conducted W3C Web Standards tests for HTML5, SVG 1.1 2nd edition, CSS3 media queries, CSS3 borders & backgrounds, CSS3 selectors, DOM level 3 core, DOM level 3 events and DOM level 2 style across a variety of browsers.

These browsers included IE9 May 2010 Preview, Firefox 3.6.3, Opera 10.52, Apple Safari 4.05, and Google Chrome 4.1 all running on Windows. The results are very promising for IE9.

A preview IE9 build can be downloaded from the IE Test Drive website.

They base this data on their Google Analytic data that is collected from their website, with users of the site being described as early adopters.

ReadWriteWeb data shows a big drop in Firefox users over the last 12 months, from 54% to 39%, while Chrome has enjoyed a jump from 7% to 18%, all while Internet Explorer usage has stayed constant at around 25%. These statistics make this theory sound plausible.

We can’t vouch for these figures in our own statistics, but it is interesting none the less. Market Share data from Net Applications shows that Firefox is still gaining share slowly, while Chrome is also growing, and Internet Explorer is on a one way slop down.

This would suggest that Firefox may be taking users away from Internet Explorer, but that older and more experienced Firefox users are taking the plunge to Google’s Chrome browser.

Either way, the entrance of Chrome into the market has surely stirred things up. Statistics over the next few months will be very interesting, with yesterdays release of Chrome for Mac and Linux.

The problem according to Opera, is that the ballot screen is completely obstructed when a user opens Internet Explorer for the first time on a fresh installation of Windows.

Opera fears that users will just ignore the ballot screen, and continue to use Internet Explorer without realising they had a choice.

Microsoft has dismissed the claims. “This scenario is very easy to reproduce in a test lab, but would occur only in unusual cases in the real world. For it to occur with the Browser Choice screen, the user would need to have IE set as their default browser and have never configured it for use. Opera’s example, where a Windows XP user has rejected installation of IE 8 for the year it has been available but suddenly decides to install it is not realistic” said a Microsoft spokesperson.

Opera has alerted the European Union of the problem.

Internet Explorer 8 is safe this time, while the vulnerability could allow for remote code execution when a user visits a website with the malicious inserted in it. Full details on the issue can be seen in Microsoft Security Advisory (981374).

The update is included with Security Bulletin MS10-018 and the flaw is rated as critical, and was originally expected during the 13th April update cycle.

“The Internet Explorer team accelerated testing of this update due to the growing attacks against the publicly disclosed vulnerability” wrote Microsoft Security Response Center Group Manager Jerry Bryant.

The update is available from Microsoft Update, or will be pushed out to Windows users who have automatic updates turned on.

The browser, which is clearly still in its early stages, is missing the expected Internet Explorer interface such as tabs and address bar, but it does allow users to test and see the new JavaScript and rendering engine in action.

Available at ietestdrive.com, the browser includes support for some HTML5 and CSS3 features, including the new video element and CSS3 border radius tags.

Video tag support appears to be limited to the H.264 and MPEG4, while audio is limited to MP3 and AAC, totally ignoring the OGG format for both video and audio.

Microsoft really seems to be pushing standards compliance, and performance with this relase, and it shows. While not perfect, the browser is already leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor, IE8. With the aid of the new JavaScript engine (codenamed Chakra), the early release browser is able to complete the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test with a score of 598.80, slightly faster than Firefox 3.6. The browser also scores 55/100 in the ACID3 test, while IE8 only scores 20/100.

Internet Explorer 9 will be limited to only Windows Vista and Windows 7 users, while XP users will miss out on release.

All round, Microsoft really seem to be putting in a lot of effort with Internet Explorer 9, and it really shows. The Internet Explorer 9 “test drive” is available from the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive website.

“Integrating with your web browser, Flash Player 10.1 will automatically clear stored data in accordance with your browser’s private browsing settings” said Adobe Engineer Jimson Xu.

Flash Player 10.1 supports private browsing with Internet Explorer 8+, Mozilla Firefox 3.5+, and Google Chrome 1.0+, with Apple’s Safari 2.0+support coming soon.

Missing from this list is Opera, which has only recently included private browsing in the latest 10.50 alpha release.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is currently in Beta and is expected in the first half of this year. Beta 2 can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

A new security advisory was posted by Microsoft last Wednesday, notifying users of a potential flaw in Internet Explorer which could allow third-parties access to data.

“Our investigation so far has shown that if a user is using a version of Internet Explorer that is not running in Protected Mode an attacker may be able to access files with an already known filename and location” said the advisory from Microsoft.

At this stage, there are no reported attacks using this vulnerability, but it is bound to be only a matter of time.

A patch is expected in a few days, on Tuesday 9th February 2010.

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers” said Google Apps Senior Product Manager Rajen Sheth.

Not to feel left out, Google is also dropping support for Firefox 2, Chrome 3, and Safari 2.

“While you’ll still be able to access these Google applications, newer features may not be available and some features may even stop working” said Sheth.

Support for these older browsers is due to end on March 1st. Web users are urged to upgrade their web browsers before this time.