Quero Toolbar was nominated for the Softwarepark Hagenberg Award and won the second place in the category junior award at yesterday's award ceremony. My presentation for that award is now online.

Quero Launcher allows you now to easily change the user agent string of IE to simulate another browser.

In order to reduce the waiting time and improve the quality of the next Quero Toolbar version I have decided to release a public beta version. This beta version is not the final product and is mainly intended for testing and collecting user feedback. If you like testing new products and like to comment on it, I would love to invite you to participate in this software test. You can easily switch between the beta and production version by downloading and running the particular installer. I am excited to present you these new features:

• IE7 support
• Ad Blocker (improved and configurable):
  Opting out of different forms of online advertisement like Flash, banner, Google, IntelliTXT or DIV layer ads;
  Opting in: you can maintain a whitelist of Web sites you want to allow certain content;
  More control: most of the blocked content is now made accessible in a list
• Navigation buttons added
• More compact toolbar layout (search engine box is now hideable)
• IDN highlighting improved (now activated on mouse hover over the IDN icon)
• Better synchronisation of your search history and settings among all open IE instances
• Fixed various bugs

I have written a paper about IDN Address Spoofing Attacks and how Quero deals with the emerging security threat.

I have added more useful tips and links to the IE tips section. Please keep your own questions and feedback coming (email support@q...).

Due to a patent dispute between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies who claims having "invented" the idea of embedding external program objects into hypermedia documents, now users have to activate Flash animations, video clips or Java applets with an unnecessary extra click. The ActiveX update causing this change was included in the last cumulative security update MS06-013 which was released on April 11. Fortunately, Web publishers can update their Web sites to avoid the activation. Basically, the objects need to be created in an external Java script to workaround the activation. More information about possible workarounds is provided in the MSDN article Activating ActiveX Controls.

Quero Toolbar 3 is currently under development and optimized for IE7, the next generation of Internet Explorer with tabbed browsing, better CSS support, improved page zooming and many security enhancements. Check out this first screenshot of Quero Toolbar 3 in IE7. Today I have released a revised version of Quero Launcher which is now compatible with IE7.

Quero has passed the 10,000 downloads milestone in January 2006. Thank you to everyone for the invaluable feedback and supporting the project.