Gary Share, product management director of the Internet Explorer team, says Microsoft is sending the updates to about one million PCs per day.
Though these automatic updates are sent without any interaction from the Windows user, the software asks customers whether they want to install IE 7 before proceeding with the installation.More info at PC World. European and Arabic versions will start rolling out later this week. Asian versions like the Japanese, Korean and Chinese one and also the Hebrew version of Internet Explorer 7 will take a bit longer. These versions are due by the end of June 2007.
Schare's team is allowing three months to roll out the automatic updates to all users, but they hope that the process will move more quickly than that. "We'd like to get the software out to as many people as quickly as possible, because we think there's a lot of security value," he said.
The IE team has been keeping the pace of the rollout low to prevent Microsoft's technical support center from being overwhelmed, and to prevent administrators who are not blocking the update from being crushed with software updates next week when Microsoft will release six sets of security patches.