May 30, 2005
No IE7 on Win2k
There are two important events that will happen to the support policy for Windows 2000 after June 30th of this year.
First, support for both IE 5.01 SP3 and IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 SP3 will expire. Users running IE 5.01 or IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 should upgrade to Windows 2000 SP4 in order to continue to receive security updates…
It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.
To put it simpy - This sucks! It’s not really surprising but it still sucks. Win2k is still a perfectly good OS for many users and organizations and if MS would just support it, it would continue to be for a long time. Indeed for many Win2k is a better alternative than Win XP, in my opinion.