IE7 To Ship With Windows Patches Tomorrow [Not]

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft plans to push out Internet Explorer 7 as a 'high priority update' when it ships security patches tomorrow, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. That means anyone who has Windows configured to download and install patches automagically from Redmond will be greeted with IE7 next time they boot up their machines. In related news, it appears IE's worldwide market share actually increased a couple of points since July, despite a number of high profile zero-day attacks this year." The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.

Update: 10/09 21:26 GMT by kd : An anonymous reader points to this Microsoft blog posting where it is revealed that the article linked above is incorrect. IE7 will not be pushed tomorrow.

The article says this month

[alta]

The article has been updated because microsoft will not confirm "tomorrow" but will confirm this month.

Tomorrow seems a likely time to me...

no no no

[jaiyen]

The RFTA references a post on the Microsoft IE blog that says IE7 is coming 'real soon now' and that it "will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it's available for download". How the submitter took that to mean it's going to be automatically for everyone from tomorrow is a mystery.

The article says "could be"

[origamy]

Please RTFA before posting: "According to a post on the company's IE blog, that high-priority update could be IE7"

If you dont want to install it...

[jorghis]

If want to prevent the automatic install MS has a page for you here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/updatemanagement/ windowsupdate/ie7announcement.mspx [microsoft.com]

It looks like you have the option to just click "no thanks" when it asks you if you want to upgrade to IE7.

Tomorrow is not accurate

[DigitlDud]

The blog post the article is referring to says it will be pushed out via Automatic Updates a FEW WEEKS after it's available for download. And it's not available for download yet. Somehow I doubt they ment tomorrow.

Re:admission

[Timesprout]

No the IE team specifically made a design decision against using tabs back when they were building version 5 of IE.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[pe1chl]

This does not really work. You can install multiple versions but they will all send the same browser version to the website and the "conditional comment" evaluation is also done using one version.
That will break the methods you can use to have different versions of the browser looking at the same content in a way compatible to each of them.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[APLowman]

I'm going to assume you never looked under Tools->Options->Privacy->Passwords because there is this handy checkbox that turns off saving passwords. The reason it is on by default is because many users would think Firefox didn't have that feature, since most users don't look at the options screen. Firefox has always had the ability to turn this off completely, as well as the ability to turn it off by domain; offering much better control then IE. Really there is no reason to use IE as your primary browser, just get the IE tab plugin for Firefox so that when you hit a stie that dosn't work you can switch to IE to use it.

How to avoid a possible disaster - For Admins

[mgpeter]

This is for all the Network Admins for Windows Networks.

If you do not want Automatic Updates to Install IE7 when it is released then just set the following registry key on every workstation:

Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0
Key value name: DoNotAllowIE70

* When the key value name is not defined, distribution is not blocked.
* When the key value name is set to 0, distribution is not blocked.
* When the key value name is set to 1, distribution is blocked.

NOTE: This is highly recommended as everytime I dealt with any Major release from Microsoft things started getting trashed. Microsoft should NOT Automatically deploy this in this way.

For lazy/Proficient Admins here is a Kixtart Script to do this on a list of computers over the network: NoAutoIE7.txt [pcc-services.com]

But it still has serious usability bugs

[SpryGuy]

I have not once been able to get IE7 to launch a windows media player file (audio MP3 or video WMV) successfully. It launches the Media Player as expected, which then hangs consuming tons of CPU forever, until you actively kill it with Task Manager.

The suggested work-around of disabling the anti-phishing filter doesn't work (and isn't acceptable anyway).

LOTS of people are experiencing this problem. I can't believe they're pushing it out with this serious of an issue. I've provided them logs and such, but they only got them last Thursday, so I doubt there's been any fix (hell, I doubt they've even looked at them yet).

It's completely irresponsible to be pushing it out. Looking at the list of outstanding "large" bugs, and knowing the problems I myself have had with it, it's not yet ready for primetime.