I was considering prefacing this post with 'recipe for disaster', but I didn't want the food and cooking news aggregators to pick it up by mistake. Microsoft Watch is reporting that the Redmond giant is planning to use their Automatic Updates service to push IE 7 out to Windows users sooner or later in Q4 once the product is ready to ship. Fortunately for the sysadmins in the crowd, Microsoft will also provide corporations with the ability to optionally block or postpone the automatic download and installation of IE 7. Further, the update will be presented through a notification - it won't just happen automatically - and users who have chosen to hide IE altogether won't even be bothered with the download at all.

Of course, Windows users will still need to pass the WGA test, whether they grab this 4-years-coming update to Internet Explorer, whether they grab it through Automatic Updates or download it from Microsoft's site.