I have just written a feature article about Internet Explorer 7?s future. Although it?s a pretty long article I do recommend you to read it all! Most of the information gathered and found in the article was taken from a private chat event which took place last Friday, September 2 (2005) between beta testers and Microsoft IE team members. "Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 will indeed support Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2003 SP1 (possibly R2 support too) and x64 support. Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 will also support English, German and Japanese. However, on the final release Internet Explorer 7 will support the same languages as Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 SP1. The Internet Explorer team might have a surprise for beta testers. They (IE team), mentioned that a new user experience or user interface can be expected in Beta 2 of Internet Explorer."

The chat also included interesting answers about the next version after Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8. The Microsoft experts from the Internet Explorer team hinted that ?Avalon? - Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) might be used in future versions of Internet Explorer. Since, the Internet Explorer team stated that there won?t be any download manager in IE 7; we suppose that it will be included in Internet Explorer 8.

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