Monday, June 06, 2005

IE7 to run only in Windows XP SP2

Apparently, Microsoft's new IE7 which is supposed to finally catch up to Mozilla Firefox with tabbed browsing and improved security and pop-up ad blockers will only run on Windows XP. There will be no backward support for Windows 2000. This was what was said on the Microsoft blog.

For those with Windows 2000, you have to upgrade to Windows XP. This is yet another tactic by Microsoft to have to force users to upgrade. IE7 apparently ties a lot with Windows XP SP2. According to Microsoft, they can't do backward compatibility with Windows 2000 because it would require too much work because the model is different. I thought IE was supposed to NOT depend on Windows, wasn't this the argument behind the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit? Apparently, Microsoft doesn't listen. Can't IE function as a separate application like Mozilla Firefox? This will cause many users to switch to Firefox (good!). People are not going to upgrade to Windows XP SP2 because of IE7, in fact, Windows 2000 SP4 works great and is pretty much rock solid (I used to have Windows 2000 SP4 on my laptop before I switched to XP). In fact, my wireless worked better with Windows 2000 than with XP. My wireless didn't work at all with XP, until SP2 fixed the problem. Apparently, XP SP2 fixes some stuff with the wireless wizard so it works fine for me now.

Some IE-specific sites mind you don't run well in Firefox, unless you get some kind of IE plugin for Firefox which I've heard about. But you can download Netscape 7 browser which will have both the IE rendering engine and Mozilla Gecko for Firefox.

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