IE7 Architecture

I have been viewing a screen cast on IE7 - WEB321 from Teched 2007 by Douglas Stamper.

Particularly good on this website was the difference in architecture (with regard to privileges) see pictures and also the availability of virtual machines for IE6 and IE7.

The key aspect is the extra layers in IE7, and thus internet explorer rights have been reduced - runs with low user rights or least privileged mode. Writing to the machine or getting ino the registry is now protected. The temp internet files (tif) is where all files will be written (cached). The beauty is the tif is untrusted and trying to execute anything out of the tif will bring up a warning.