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The software giant in early January made a change on its computer systems that allowed Web sites fitted with a new type of security certificate to display a green-filled address bar in IE 7, Markellos Diorinos, a product manager for Windows at Microsoft, said in an interview.

"We have rolled out many of the parts that are required to get it working. We're coming close to the point where all the moving parts are in place," Diorinos said. Microsoft plans to promote the green bar at next week's RSA Conference in San Francisco, an annual security confab kicked off by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

The colored address bar is meant as a sign that a site can be trusted, giving Web surfers the green light to carry out transactions there. It is a new weapon in the fight against phishing scams. The green bar already appears on the secured sites of Overstock.com and VeriSign.

VeriSign has about 300 customers, including online retailer Overstock.com, who signed up for the green bar certification process, said Spiros Theodossiou, a senior product manager at VeriSign. The company plans to unveil the names of more participating Web sites at the RSA Conference, he said.

Phishing is a prevalent online scam that uses faked Web sites to trick people into giving up personal information. The scams cost businesses millions of dollars and hurt consumer trust in the Net. Nearly $2 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales are estimated to be lost in 2006 due to security concerns, according to a recent Gartner survey.

"We are including support for EV certificates in Firefox 3, but we are still investigating how we will communicate the additional information to the user," said Window Snyder, security chief at Mozilla, which coordinates development of Firefox, the most-used Web browser after IE. Firefox 3 is due in the second half of the year, Snyder said.

Representatives for Opera have said that they are waiting to see how Microsoft fares with the green bar in IE7, which last month reached over 100 million users, before adding such functionality to its browser.

Adoption of EV SSL certificates is expected to ramp up as more people become aware of the feature. "We think the adoption rate can take about six to twelve months until you hit a sweet spot where most of the high profile Web sites will have it," Cybertrust's Sys said.

Microsoft plans to make promotional material available for Web site owners to explain what the green bar means Diorinos said. "I will pop the champagne when we see widespread adoption of EV and when we start seeing users be more secure online," he said.