Come January, Green means Clean, atleast for IE7

Phishing Scams have been a major problem for large corporations. As of today there aren’t any sure fire solutions.

IE, Firefox and Opera as well today implement a check to see if the site is fraudulent or not.

The CA Browser Forum, an organization comprised of companies that issue certificates for Web sites and major browser makers, has prepared a draft set of guidelines to protect users.

Among this is a colored address bar. And Microsoft is planning on implementing the same in IE7 in January, reports C|Net.

Website will be able to get hold of an EV SSL Certificate using which the browser will recognize the site and change the address bar to green.

EV SSL stands for Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer. These are SSL certificates just like those that allow encrypted connections between browsers and sites.
The difference, though, is that the identity of each certificate holder has been verified. Requestors will be subject to a strict vetting process which all issuers must follow.

However, this decision has come under flak from a lot of small businesses. The reason being that issuers of the EV SSL will perform extensive checks to verify the identity of the company. This is easy for corporations but difficult to do so for small businesses.
Small businesses complain that they may not be able to get the certificates thus putting them at a disadvantage.

With situations that stand like this, will Microsoft go ahead with such an hasty implementation? Will the reason that they are jumping at getting this implemented before other browsers is to increase usage of their browser.
Or will they wait till things are all finalized?