Microsoft has announced that its Vista-bundled browser will be renamed to 'Internet Explorer 7+' to help differentiate between the separate build for Windows XP. Public builds of Windows Vista have featured the new 'IE7+' branding for a while now, but up till now no clarification was provided by Microsoft. Late yesterday the folks over at the IEBlog posted the following:
"While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren't practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. ("The version of IE7 in Vista" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily...)"
The 'user-agent strings' for each of the browsers will be different as well. Users of IE7 on Windows XP will be identified as 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)' while IE7+ on Vista will be 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)'
Download: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 for Windows XP
View: Neowin Forum Discussion View: IEBlog
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