More news on the Internet Explorer front from the IE blog:
As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
There will be the option to roll back to IE6 at any point or ignore the update (up to a certain point I should imagine) for those corporate installations that need to take their time about these things.
I think pumping it out through Automatic Update is a good thing, and not just from the security point of view. As a web developer I’m all for a mechanism that gets a more standards compliant rendering engine out there onto as many computers as possible. The memories of the upgrade path from IE5 to IE6, and watching visitor statistics slowly change, is still indelibly etched on my mind.
I’m still confused about what they’re playing at with the user interface though.