Wednesday, 2 March 2005

MSDN Blogs on Microsoft IE7

Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7 will run on other operating systems besides Windows XP SP2, the company's official IE blog revealed Monday, but Windows 2000 remains off the list. In mid-February, chairman Bill Gates promised a new version of IE before Longhorn ships, and said the new browser -- which will concentrate on delivering additional security against such threats as phishing -- would roll into beta this summer. At that time, only Windows XP SP2 was mentioned as a supported OS.

According to the posting on the blog, IE 7 will also work on the 64-bit edition of XP (with the long title of "Windows XP Professional x64 Edition") and the upcoming Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). About Windows 2000 support, Microsoft hasn't budged from its previous position. "We have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000, but have nothing to announce at this time." On a related subject, the blog also made clear that a new version of Outlook Express, Microsoft's for-free basic e-mail client, would not appear with IE7. "There are no plans to ship the new version of Outlook Express before the next release of Windows," stated the blog.