Reversing a longstanding Microsoft policy, Bill Gates said Tuesday that the company will ship an update to its browser separately from the next major version of Windows.

A beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect said in a keynote address at the RSA Conference 2005 here. The company had said that it would not ship a new IE version before the next major update to Windows, code-named Longhorn, arrives next year.

The company sought to allay security concerns last year by issuing the SP2 update for Windows XP, which included a number of changes to browser security. But critics complained that the update would benefit only those people who either already owned XP or who had paid for an operating system upgrade, leaving about half the Windows world out in the cold.