Virtual machine as a safe browsing environment

I mentioned this in my summary yesterday morning as a possible workaround until there are patches for the WMF vulnerability that's been big news the last week. I notice that incidents.org has mentioned it too as a possibility today. VMware has released VMPLayer as a free way of running premade virtual machines.

One of those virtual machines that they provide for a free download is a browsing environment. It's called the Browser Appliance Virtual Machine and is available for download from vmware's site. It's a big download and I don't recall the hardware requirements, so it may not be a solution for everyone, but it is an option.

You should probably be careful with the installation of vmplayer as it asks if you want to include Google Desktop search. It's been found that Google desktop search indexes files in real time and can trigger a previously downloaded exploit file.