Installation Changes in IE7 Release Candidate

Hi everyone,

I’d like to point out a few changes we made to the installation process for the Release Candidate that we think you’ll like. 

Installation of the Release Candidate will automatically remove any previous version of IE7. 

If installation detects a previous version of IE7, it begins uninstall for you so you don’t have to dig through ‘Add/Remove Programs’.  After uninstall completes and the machine restarts, installation begins automatically and reboots the machine immediately when finished.  This happens after login but before the desktop appears so although the process still requires two reboots, they are part of a single setup process rather than two separate user actions and interruptions.  Naturally, we’d like to eliminate at least one (and really both) of the reboots but given our current installer technology and the dependencies other OS components have on IE binaries that unfortunately won’t happen for IE7. 

If installation of the Release Candidate can’t remove the previous version of IE7, you can upgrade anyway.

In previous releases, if a disk cleaner tool or the user removed the backup directory, it was impossible to upgrade to the latest release.  The Release Candidate, however, will upgrade in-place in this situation.  You will still be unable to get back to IE6 (we can’t put back the old files if they’ve been deleted) but you’ll be able to use the latest version of IE7.

Instances of installation failing because of registry key permissions will decrease even more.

Since we learned the breadth of this problem after the first public release in January, we’ve continually made changes in this area and have seen the problem occur less frequently in each release.  There will still be some situations where installation can’t fix a registry key’s permissions (for example, permissions are corrupt to the point where the user can’t change them manually in the registry editor), but these should be rare.

Thank you for trying IE7 and please keep reporting any issues!

John Hrvatin
Program Manager