Microsoft officials said recently that the company was not going to push Internet Explorer (IE) 9 to users who hadn’t tested its latest browser until late June.
On April 6, however, I began receiving reports from users who had not installed the Release Candidate (RC) or the beta of IE9 that they were seeing IE 9 show up via Windows Update — something that wasn’t supposed to be happening yet.
Some users were none too happy about this, given they had been expecting Microsoft to push the update to them — and their users (if they are administrators for larger networks) — for a couple more months. (One less disgruntled user did quip: “Better early than never. Now where’s my NoDo update?“)
Microsoft has marked the update as “important,” said users who began seeing it today. It is being pushed to Windows 7, Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2 users, according to reports I’m getting.
The Microsoft Knowledge Base Support site does not mention that Microsoft changed plans and decided to start pushing it two months earlier than expected.
I’ve asked Microsoft what gives. Why is the company pushing IE 9 now instead of late June? No word back yet, other than a spokesperson noting “as is standard, IE9 is available on DLC (Microsoft Download Center) for users to download it manually.”
The people from whom I’ve heard so far are not manually downloading it; they are having it pushed to them. The “published” date on the Windows Update versions is “yesterday” (April 5).
there is an
IE 9 blocking tool out there for admins who do not want IE 9 made available to their Windows users.
