Microsoft has announced that its Vista-bundled browser will be renamed to 'Internet Explorer 7+' to help differentiate between the separate build for Windows XP. IE7+ will include additional features such as protected mode, parental controls and an improved network diagnostics engine. According to the IEBlog, these features take advantage of native capabilities in the Windows Vista operating system and it wouldn't have been feasible to port them to older operating systems.

"While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren't practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. ('The version of IE7 in Vista' doesn't roll off the tongue as easily...)"

The 'user-agent strings' for each of the browsers will be different as well. Users of IE7 on Windows XP will be identified as 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)' while IE7+ on Vista will be 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)'