Microsoft Speeds Up IE7 Phishing Filter

We are Firefox people here and plan on staying that way, especially since Firefox is currently under the radar of those wacky hackers :). However, we also design websites and so have to view our work across several different browsers.

That means we have to use Microsoft IE. Naturally, we now have IE7 and were pleased to see that Microsoft incorporated many Firefox features into its newest browser.

Microsoft also implemented a phishing filter and touted it as a new security feature. When you visit a site, IE will examine it to make sure it is a legitimate site and not one setup by a phisher (there are Firefox plugins that do the same thing). Great idea! Anything the helps protect our sensitive data is awesome!

But, holy moly it takes a long time to view a page in IE! So long, in some cases, that we hit the “stop” button so we can go visit a different site (maybe that is part of the anti-phishing abilities of IE – if you don’t actually load the entire site, no one can phish your data, hmmmm).

Anyway, I guess we were not the only ones bothered by the increase in time spent surfing the ‘net with IE. Microsoft has taken some steps to fix this issue and has issued a patch which will prevent the phishing filter slowdown.

However, the patch was not part of the automatic updates for everyone. In essence, if you use IE 7, you should visit Microsoft’s site and download it manually.