Old News, News To Me: IE7 Being Released For WinXP SP2

Posted by Dan on Jul 25, 2005 @ 9:58 AM

Ok, this is I guess is old news, but it's news to me. Apparently Microsoft has changed their stance on releasing another version of Internet Explorer for their current OS line.

Originally, Microsoft had taken a stance that IE 7 would be a "Longhorn" (now officially named Windows Vista) product only and that v6 was going to be the last release for all current versions of the Microsoft OS. It's now looking like that stance has changed.

Building on those advancements, Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.
- Microsoft PressPass

That news clip is actually from February of this year, but I don't recall reading anything about it. I'm sure the success of Mozilla has a lot to do with Microsoft's change of heart. They're losing market share by the barrel, so I'm sure they're hoping they can sway some interest back to IE with a new release.

Categories: JavaScript, HTML/ColdFusion, Flex/Flash, Java, Source Code

4 Comments

  • Raymond Camden's Gravatar
    Raymond Camden
    Of course, what would be really helpful, is if they - lord forbid - actually allowed you to run IE 6 and 7 on the same box. I know that sounds crazy - but it would be nice for those of us who have to develop web sites.
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Unfortunately, they probably just see it as a way to see Virtual PC licenses. ;)

    I do believe there's a way to run IE6 in "compatibility mode"--which is supposed to emulate v5.5, but if memory serves me correctly it wasn't very reliable in it's results.

    It would be nice to be install IE like you can Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, but when you try to tie everything into a central API, it becomes a lot harder to seperate everything to work independently.

    My guess is the best MS could do is allow for *future* versions of IE to run concurrently, but we're probably stuck with having to run some kind of virtual machine in order to run previous versions of IE.
  • Brendan's Gravatar
    Brendan
    Hi people,

    Don't want to sound like the know-it-all, but it is quite possible to run multiple differing versions of IE on the one machine, no virtual voodoo required.

    See this thread for a jumping point:
    http://www.skyzyx.com/archives/000094.php

    Ciao.
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Brendan,

    Well I have not seen that technique before, I know you used to be able to get a Windows For Workgroup copy of the browser running in parallel. The problem is, that never really worked reliable to me.

    It seems like the method listed on that page has problems w/sessions and cookies which would potential make the browsers unusable for anything other than testing static pages.

    Have you experienced issues w/the browsers? Also, because all of the installs will report the latest version of IE installed, some browser detections routines would cause failures.

    (NOTE: You should never try to detect a browser by user agent, but instead should do object detection via JS. Unfortunately, some people do it that way and it's not reliable at all. Many browsers allow you to define what you want sent as the user agent string.)

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