If you've been doing much reading on any of the tech oriented sites recently you have undoubtedly seen the huge number of articles devoted to safe internet browsing practices. All of a sudden it has become 'fashionable' to use virtual machines for browsing and a host of other functions. Some of the journalists have been treating this concept as if it is something new. The reality is that virtual machines have been around a long time and are widely used by developers and beta testers.

What does using a virtual machine for browsing have to do with security? It's no secret that Internet Explorer has been plagued with many security vulnerabilities. The appearance of alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera have helped with secure browsing and gained in popularity, but even that alone isn't enough to protect against spyware, adware, and malware being introduced into the system. Enter the virtual machine, an operating system that runs within an operating system. With this technology you can effectively isolate certain functions to a virtual machine dedicated to a specific purpose. When the task is completed, reset the virtual machine to a pristine state that eliminates all the recent activity. That eliminates the primary operating system from being compromised by internet activity since it and the virtual machines are separate entities.

I mentioned above this technology has been around for quite some time, so why is it just now becoming popular? First of all, it isn't free if you want to create your own virtual machines and run them on your system. You have to buy the application to create your own virtual machines. However, the virtual machine landscape changed dramatically a few months ago when VMware introduced the free VMware Player. As you might guess from the word 'Player' in the name of the product, you still can't create your own virtual machines with the VMware Player, but here is what it's possible to do as quoted directly from VMware's website.

Simply put, that means that if someone has created a virtual machine and wishes to share it with you, for the price of a free download of the VMware Player you can have it up and running on your machine within minutes. I want to make it very clear at this point that you can easily run afoul of licensing agreements if you aren't careful. Just because you 'can' do it doesn't mean you have the right to run multiple copies of an operating system. However, if you read what VMware had to say above again, you'll see they mention pre-built application environments. One of these pre-built application environments called the 'Browser Appliance' [09/05/2011 Link Deactivated] is what has really stirred things up recently about safely browsing the web.

Here is what VMware has to say about the Browser Appliance.

In addition to the Browser Appliance there are a number of other pre-built application environments that are also available as free downloads from the VMware site. The Virtual Machine Center contains many pre-built virtual machines from platform and application vendors as well as Community Virtual Machines built by individuals. Heed the warnings on the page before you download as the files can be huge, ranging anywhere from 200MB to 2GB in size. If you've ever wanted to play around with Linux and see what all the fuss is about, this is the way to do it without compromising your primary operating system in any way. For example, Figure 02 shows KDE 3.5 running on SUSE Linux 10 that is completely preconfigured and ready to go. Just download the file and open it in the VMware Player.