Microsoft’s IE 7 ‘Auto-Rollout’ Won’t Force You To Upgrade
Microsoft’s recent announcement that on February 12 Internet Explorer 7 will be marked for “automatic installation” has caused quite a commotion among users fearing they will be forced to upgrade their IE 6 installations.
Luckily for you die-hard IE 6 fans, that’s not what’s actually going to happen.
The Microsoft knowledge base article which announces the auto installation, stems from an earlier announcement that IE 7 would be made available to pirated copies of Windows XP. Next month Internet Explorer will become an “auto-rollup” for Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which means it can be delivered to even those installations that don’t meet Microsoft’s definition of genuine. But WSUS isn’t the same as Windows Update, so there’s really no need to panic.
The short story is that you won’t wake up February 12 and find your beloved IE 6 has been replaced with IE 7.
Of course while the update won’t affect the average home user, if you’re an IT admin and you use WSUS to manage the rollout of updates across your network, you may wake up and find that Internet Explorer is now at version seven. However, the default behavior of WSUS is not automatic installation so what happens will depend on your specific configuration.
These are the conditions under which you may be affect by the new auto-update rollout:
- You use WSUS 3.0 to manage updates in your organization.
- You have Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computers or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based computers that have Internet Explorer 6 installed.
- You have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollups for installation.
The knowledge base article has detailed instruction on how to disable the auto-update feature in WSUS and also explains what you need to do after February 12 to turn it back on, but still not install IE 7.
Given that IE 7 can render intranets designed specifically for IE 6 largely unusable, IT managers will want to carefully review the instructions and make sure that auto-update is disabled before February 12 rolls around.
Obviously if you’ve upgraded to Windows Vista, none of this applies since you already have IE 7.
[via Ars Technica]
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