A brief recap for those just emerging from their caves: Firefox 3 announced the goal of setting the one-day record for downloads of a single piece of software, and on June 17, the browser scored over 8 million downloads. Here's something even the tech-savvy may have missed, though: that OTHER browser, the one with the huge market share, has been running its own download campaign. It's called Carbongrove, and it's an Internet Explorer 7-compatible, Silverlight-based site that pushes reduced carbon usage and up-to-date web standards.

If you want to take the plunge and download IE7 or IE8 beta, you can then head to Carbongrove.com, take a quick quiz, and plant your own virtual tree. It might not be the cool, trendy thing to do (that would be downloading Firefox), but at least Microsoft is making an attempt to spread a little awareness about a cause that matters. This campaign launched two months ago, though, and we're just hearing about it now. Might be that world records and new releases trump carbon footprints and Acid Test results in the cutthroat world of browser downloads.

Recently, we told you about some ways to organize and manage your Firefox bookmarks, and one of our readers asked for similar suggestions to use with Internet Explorer. Since we want Michael and our other IE-using friends to loved too, we put together a few ideas for you.

Favorites Box lets you add extra attributes to your bookmarks to make them easier to find and organize. Add comments, categories, tags, or login information or even set up a reminders. This one's free to try, but sets you back $19.95 if you want to keep it.

Favorites Finder is a free extension that adds keyword functionality to your bookmarked sites so you can access them in just a couple of keystrokes. Just type a few letters of the site you're looking for and Favorites Finder will search your bookmarks and find all the matches, including whatever's in your folders.

Power Favorites is a slick little extension that merges bookmarks from IE, Opera, and Firefox, then syncs them across multiples computers. You can annotate each bookmark with notes and tags, then view them by tag list or tag clouds. (Tag clouds? Are you listening, Foxmarks?) Power Favorites has a 30-day free trial, then it's $19.95.

When you finally decide to winnow down that super-long list of Favorites you've accumulated over the past two years, it's a pain to have to check each bookmark to make sure the site still exists. Use the free tool Favorites Inspector instead. It will plow through your whole list for you and alert you to any "404 error" pages so you can delete those Favorites instead of filing them.

Some might say the best way to improve your web browsing experience with Internet Explorer 7 would be to download Firefox or Opera (hey, I didn't say it, "some" said it!).

But if you've got you heart set on IE7 for one reason or another, you might want to check out IE7Pro, a plugin that adds a whole bunch of nifty features. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Tabbed browsing enhancements like double click to close a tab, open new tabs from the address bar, and hide the search bar
• Mouse gestures: right-click and drag your mouse up, down, left and right to navigate the current page or move to the next or previous pages
• Ad Blocker
• A crash recovery feature that restores all the pages you had open when your browser crashed
• Save pages to a text file
• Greasemonkey-like IE7Pro Script for adding new functions via scripts.

[via Vecosys]

With the introduction of both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 recently, one thing is certainly clear - the browser market is finally starting to become interesting again, after years of being stagnant. It really was Mozilla's Firefox browser that shook the sleeping Microsoft behemoth into realizing that it wasn't adequate to simply sit at IE6.

Of the notable things that Firefox has been doing better than IE for awhile now, one of the most important has been browser extensibility, or add-ons as they're now known on both browsers. For Firefox, we've had the Firefox Add-Ons site for some time now. It keeps an index of recently submitted add-ons (previously known as extensions). Previously there wasn't an analog in the IE world, in terms of an officially sponsored IE Add-On site.

Now there is; Microsoft now maintains Add-Ons for Microsoft Internet Explorer, the equivalent of Firefox Add-Ons but for IE. Although currently extremely short on content (actual add-ons), the site is organized nicely and is easy to get around. One frustration for me is that IE add-ons are distributed as executable files, and are actually added to my Add / Remove Programs listing. I'd much prefer for IE add-ons to be distributed in a custom format, and managed from within the browser, as Firefox does with its XPI distribution format.

According to security firm Secunia, the just-released Internet Explorer 7 contains a "Redirection Information Disclosure" vulnerability, which allows one site to fetch data from another site through the browser, which opens it up to all kinds of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Interestingly, the same vulnerability has been known and unpatched in IE6 since April. It's one thing not to patch an old browser, but seems quite another to release a brand new browser with the same vulnerability that you've been aware of for six months. If you're running Internet Explorer and want to see the exploit in action, Secunia has set up a demo page.

I was considering prefacing this post with 'recipe for disaster', but I didn't want the food and cooking news aggregators to pick it up by mistake. Microsoft Watch is reporting that the Redmond giant is planning to use their Automatic Updates service to push IE 7 out to Windows users sooner or later in Q4 once the product is ready to ship. Fortunately for the sysadmins in the crowd, Microsoft will also provide corporations with the ability to optionally block or postpone the automatic download and installation of IE 7. Further, the update will be presented through a notification - it won't just happen automatically - and users who have chosen to hide IE altogether won't even be bothered with the download at all.

Of course, Windows users will still need to pass the WGA test, whether they grab this 4-years-coming update to Internet Explorer, whether they grab it through Automatic Updates or download it from Microsoft's site.