AN FRANCISCO, Feb. 15 - Bill Gates said on Tuesday that Microsoft planned to introduce this summer a new version of its Internet Explorer Web browser with stronger features to protect against viruses and other vexing security flaws that have plagued Windows users.
In a speech at the RSA computer security conference, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said the company was making progress in its fight against spam, adding that "phishing" software scams were the fastest-growing security problem the company faced. He said the company was currently spending about $2 billion a year on computer security development and research.
Mr. Gates did not mention the Firefox browser, which is freely available and has rapidly gained users since it was introduced by the open-source Mozilla Foundation late last year. But Firefox is apparently enough of a threat that Microsoft felt compelled to rush Internet Explorer 7.0 into the market, ahead of the Longhorn version of Windows, which is not due out until 2006.
"Browsing is a vulnerability," Mr. Gates said. He said the company would make a test version of the program available this summer. "It will be another important advance," he added.
The computer security industry has generally been skeptical of Microsoft's security efforts because the company has struggled against viruses and is often blamed for the problems that plague many personal computers.
But on Tuesday Mr. Gates received support from one security expert who has been a frequent critic of Microsoft. Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer who is founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a security company based in Mountain View, Calif., said: "In the past he has made ridiculous promises. Today he was realistic, and he didn't make grandiose claims. I think he realizes it's a hard problem."
In addition to announcing Internet Explorer 7.0, Mr. Gates demonstrated the company's new anti-spyware technology that it obtained with the acquisition of Giant Software in December. The company is offering the software free to Windows users.
At the conference Mr. Gates also showed a system called Spynet, which makes it possible for Microsoft to collect data needed to counter attacks.
About 6.8 million computer users have downloaded a test version of the anti-spyware program, according to Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president. Of that number, about three million are now routinely sending monitoring data to Microsoft.
Despite the optimistic assessment by Mr. Gates of Microsoft's ability to tackle security flaws, there were executives at the conference who said Microsoft was not helping computer users, but was merely advancing its own interests.
Gregor Freund, chief technology officer for Check Point Software Technologies, for one, was not impressed with Microsoft's recent decision to acquire Sybari Software Inc., a company that makes antivirus software. After all, he said, Microsoft's products created the security problems and had caused "billions of dollars of damage to their users."
