Securing online transactions is one of the IE7 programmers' main concerns, this project revolving around the means of managing HTTPS.

Eric Lawrence, IE program manager, mentioned in the Microsoft Internet Explorer Blog that IE7 will support the TLS (Transport Layer Security) by default. Now,, the Microsoft browser is designed to automatically use SSL 2.0, but users can switch manually to TLS, which provides much safer data encryption.

Because Microsoft will give up on the SSL 2.0 support, any website that still requires this protocol should upgrade in order to be compatible with the new protocol.
However, Lawrence says that shouldn't be taken quite dramatically as there are "only a handful" of such sites.

Internet Explorer 7 will also behave differently when it encounters security problems. In IE6, the user was informed about the problem by having a dialog box appear on screen. Based on the information provided by the system, the user had to make a security decision. This will not happen in Internet Explorer 7, which will apply the XPSP2 "secure by default" formula.

Something that will not please a great number of users is the fact that in IE7 only the secure content will be rendered by default, while the user will have to choose to access the rest via the information bar.