Both major browsers - Internet Explorer and Firefox released major upgrades in the last 30 days. Firefox users are apparently more receptive to the upgrade. To alleviate the acceptance issue, Microsoft is force-installing the upgrade on millions of machines around the world.
How exactly can they do that? They are releasing it through Windows Automatic Update. And as part of that release, they are flagging it as a high priority update - which means that a significant portion of Windows machines will push the update through within the next several days.
The upside for webmasters is that this push will begin a new era in which you can actually write sane CSS for your new sites. The downside is that the insane CSS that you put together for IE6 now has to be revised, re-written, re-hacked.
Of course, machines not verified through Windows Genuine Advantage (MS's crazy licensing verification scheme) will not receive the update.
This upgrade has a hidden feature that will affect the bottom line of both Google and Microsoft this month. By default, IE7 uses Microsoft's search engine rather than Google. Millions of users will have their search engine preference reset and a significant portion of them will not know how to change it back to Google any time in the near future.
From a webmasters perspective, it means that in the short term, you need to focus on all of the MSN/Live.com search engine strategies you've known about but never spent much time on. Expect referrals from MSN/Live to see a decent boost this month.
Force Feeding IE7 Interaction
