Announcing IE7+

by admin May 28, 2006 at 6:01 pm

With the release of Windows Vista Beta 2, I want to announce that we will be naming the version of IE7 in Windows Vista ?¢‚Ǩ?ìInternet Explorer 7+?¢‚Ǩ¬ù. 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?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (?¢‚Ǩ?ìThe version of IE7 in Vista?¢‚Ǩ¬ù doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t roll off the tongue as easily?¢‚Ǩ¬¶)

These differences shouldn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t affect most web developers, but if you need to know specifically, you can refer to the OS field of the User-Agent string. As Eric noted previously, the User-Agent strings will have the info you need:
IE7+ running on Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
IE7 running on Windows XP: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Read more: IEBlog