IE8 Update Blocker - now available from Microsoft

[tedster]

As release time approaches for IE8, Microsoft moves forward with plans to update IE7 through automatic updates (AU). But MS also realizes there are many situations where IT departments may want to prevent this update for their users until the new browser is fully tested in their environment.

To help prevent users from installing IE8 through Automatic Update before compatibility testing has been completed, we are providing the IE8 Blocker Toolkit. This toolkit has no expiration date and can be configured either by running the registry file on the client machines or via Group Policy in domain joined environments. The Blocker Toolkit is available today from the Microsoft Download Center.

[blogs.msdn.com...]

[coopster]

Not a bad idea for certain installations I guess. They could certainly circumvent the issue altogether by allowing multiple versions of browsers to run at any given time on a single machine though.

[swa66]

So far for hoping IE8 would wipe out the poor implementations of CSS in the current IE6 and IE7 incarnations.

It'll give us one more browser to test for a long while to come. For all I care a very bad move.

[incrediBILL]

I'm going to block it on my machine and not mention it to the wife, use her as the guinea pig to see what happens!

[SEOMike]

I'm so glad that they offered this. I admin project management software for my family's construction business and it will NOT work with IE8. The company that makes the software took 9 months to make it work with IE7. Glad that MS is offering a blocker that's easy to implement.

[g1smd]

Shame it couldn't be reprogrammed to download Seamonkey, Firefox, or Opera, instead.

[SEOMike]

I'm going to block it on my machine and not mention it to the wife, use her as the guinea pig to see what happens!

HA! I love it! Maybe I'll do the same!

[grelmar]

I'm going to block it on my machine and not mention it to the wife, use her as the guinea pig to see what happens!

My solution was to build my wife a bomb proof *nix box. Cut out 90% of my household IT support duties.

[vincevincevince]

IT departments may want to prevent this update for their users until the new browser is fully tested in their environment

In that case, this tool should have been time limited - i.e. working only for six months and then self-removing. That gives the 'IT department' time to test and update their local systems.

Note that 99% of legacy systems will just need an IE7 compatibility meta tag - that alone should make this tool redundant.

[koan]

Anything that makes IE 6.0 enough of a minority browser that we don't have to test it with anymore is a good thing in my book. I long for the day where pages that work with Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari also works with IE on first try.

[Wlauzon]

I am betting that some percentage will refuse to update to IE8 and keep IE6 just out of spite.

I am already seeing about 2% IE8 users in our logs, so maybe there is some hope.

[IanTurner]

I'm going to block it on my machine and not mention it to the wife, use her as the guinea pig to see what happens!

HA! I love it! Maybe I'll do the same!

--HeeHee, My wife does the IT Support in our house.

I.E. 6 is still second in marketshare as far as browsers go for us.

1Internet Explorer 7.x 45.24%
2Internet Explorer 6.x 22.55%
3Firefox 19.39%
4Safari 4.88%
5Google Desktop 1.46%
6Mozilla/4.0 1.34%
7Opera 1.02%

I still think Windows 2000 was the best operating system MS ever produced and everything since then has been a degradation of the OS. Given that you can't run IE 7+ on Win 2000 I'd say your going to see IE 6 around for a while yet. We see about 2.5% of visitors still using Win 2000, 98, NT, ME or 95

[Web_speed]

I just installed IE8 beta.

Very pleasantly surprised. Many new features...and fasttttt browsing. This thing is a very serious contender to chrome and FF.

Add the IE7Pro plug-in to it and forget the rest. Love it.

[SEOMike]

What a pain. The blocker doesn't install correctly in Vista. Of course. It runs fine, but no registry change is made. Running it as administrator doesn't help. Man I hate Vista.

[Visit Thailand]

I recently downloaded ie8 beta 2 but so many sites I visited using it are broken or just look plain weird that i decided to uninstall it and revert to ie7.

Surely a new browser has to be backwards compatible

[Wlauzon]

I just installed IE8 on a machine here also to test out our sites, and it still seems to have some serious problems with javascript menus, among other things.

Not sure when it is scheduled for rollout, but it still needs some work. Oddly, it seems to work better with XP than with Vista.