IE7 Platforms and Outlook Express

We’ve seen lots of questions about the IE7 announcement. Many of these we are not ready to answer and discuss at this time but there are two things that I can offer clarification on.

• Platforms. We currently plan to make IE7 available for Windows XP SP2 and later. This will therefore include availability not only for the 32bit version of Windows XP SP2 but also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1 both of which are due to be released soon. As Dean commented in his original IE7 post on this blog we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time.
• Outlook Express. It’s great to see the questions on Outlook Express which is a separate product team to Internet Explorer and is not part of the IE7 plan. The Outlook Express team is hard at work on great functionality for the new version of Outlook Express, which is shipping with the next release of Windows. There are no plans to ship the new version of Outlook Express before the next release of Windows. The Outlook Express newsgroup is a great place for discussion about that product and to leave feedback for that team.

We’ll share more details about IE7 as we get further along with the project.

Thanks
-Dave