Browser enthusiasts, Internet Explorer and Firefox fans alike, were pleasantly surprised when Internet Explorer 7′s new features were shown at Microsoft’s Community Technology Preview recently.

“I honestly don’t see why anyone would want to use Firefox,” Steve Ballmer is reported to have said, “especially considering it was programmed by a group of people you can’t trust.”

Internet Explorer 7 will sport several new features that we haven’t seen in Firefox yet:

* It has been confirmed that we’ll be seeing a phishing filter in IE7, this just helps prove that Internet Explorer is the safest, most user-friendly browser that there is.
* We also saw an exciting new technology called “Quick Tabs” which should increase the productivity of tabbed browsing compared to Firefox’s implementation. This allows you to view previews of each tab realtime.

Users can even set a tab group to open automatically every time they launch Internet Explorer from the Start menu, to have just the pages they want open ready for them as soon as they open the browser.
* Increased security, of course. That doesn’t mean Internet Explorer wasn’t bulletproof before, but as new types of attacks are developed Internet Explorer expands to fight against these types of malicious activity. As an example, the ActiveX technology which for some reason angers Firefox fans so much is now an “opt-in feature”.

There’s a lot more than this going on behind the scenes, for example printing support will be far beyond anything you can ever imagine. Steve Ballmer was happy to point out at a recent press conference that he would “crush Firefox with his own feet”, a promise that we are sure he will keep.

That’s all for now, remember, Spread Internet Explorer!