Dan Warne05 October 2007, 2:16 AM
Internet Explorer 7 is now available to all users of Windows. Yeah, yeah, OK, even the pirate ones. It's a bit like DRM-free music. Sorta.
Microsoft is, for the first time, making Internet Explorer 7 available to users of pirated copies of XP.
One thing's been obvious since the release of IE7 -- its uptake hasn't been as good as Microsoft would have hoped, regardless of the spin the company has put on things.
IE6 is still the dominant browser on the Windows platform, and IE overall continues to lose market share to Firefox.
In the last month, for example, APCMag.com only registered 50.38% Internet Explorer usage. Firefox accounted for 39.9% of users, Safari 5% and Opera 4%. Of the Internet Explorer users, nearly half -- 45.61% are still using IE6.
That's despite Microsoft instituting an automatic download program that pushed a copy of the massive IE7 installer onto every XP PC via Windows Update.
The fact that Microsoft is now removing its "Windows Genuine Advantage" anti-piracy requirement indicates that it is facing the reality that a large proportion of Windows users are running pirated copies of Windows, and if the software giant wants to achieve market domination with its new browser, it can't neglect its "black market customers".
It has also made a couple of other fine-tuning tweaks to IE7, making the menu bar show automatically rather than the user having to switch it on manually. Presumably, the radically pared-down interface for IE7 must have caused more support issues than it solved.
Microsoft has also added more "how-tos" to IE7 and made it available as an MSI installer to make it easier for network administrators to deploy it across their networks.
You can read the blog post from Microsoft about it here.