The blog of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, IEBlog, have announced that Internet Explorer 7 will be distributed by Windows XP’s Automatic Updates feature as a ‘high priority’ update when it is released. This means it will have similar status to other high priority updates which are generally security patches and important bugfixes.

The knock-on effect of this will mean that a large proportion of Windows XP machines will be automatically upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 without any interaction on the user’s part (aside from confirming the install once IE7 has been downloaded).

Microsoft are offering a free download (requires ‘Genuine Validation’) which prevents the download and installation of IE7, but this is mainly aimed at companies wanting to prevent IE7 infiltrating their networks. It’s doubtful that most home users will be bothered to stop this.

Now there is a fairly good argument on Microsoft’s part about this move. IE7 does include numerous security enhancements, and the IEBlog team cited this as the main reason for auto-distributing IE7 across Windows Update.

There could be a more sinister motive here, however, and that could be to move users away from using or trying out alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

I’ll leave that judgement up to you.