After lots of late hours and a few pre-release builds, the IE Team is happy (and a bit relieved) to say that the final version of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP has arrived. You can now download IE7 for Windows XP in English from either the IE site or the Windows Download Center. Look for IE7 in other Windows-supported languages over the coming weeks.
We expect millions of customers will upgrade to IE7 because it’s safer and easier. Some e-commerce and financial services companies like Paypal and VeriSign are endorsing IE7 because of its improved security for online transactions.
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, we’re going to start distributing IE7 in English as a high-priority update thru Automatic Updates. If you're an IT professional and have customers who want to manage their internal deployment of IE7, you should recommend they have blocking measures in place by 1 November. We think it’ll take several months to complete the distribution worldwide.
The IE Team still encourages Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows Vista when it becomes available to receive the additional benefits of IE7 in Windows Vista, such as parental controls and Protected Mode. Windows Vista is targeted to be available to volume license customers in November and all other customers in January 2007, although as we’ve said before, the exact delivery date will be driven by the quality of the final product.
And finally, if you run into any glitches with IE7, we’ll be supporting it with free, unlimited phone support for consumers throughout the product life cycle. So upgrade with confidence and let your friends and family know how secure and easy the web can be with IE7.