Like Trevor said, in the IT departments I've worked in, they would decide when to push updates out, after testing them to make sure they worked with any proprietary software or the network in general.

So yes, Windows Update most certainly pushes out Internet Explorer updates. It always has. But sadly, as Peter says, I've seen way too many people who simply leave that little yellow shield in their system tray untouched. I just installed Vista Service Pack 1 on someone's computer yesterday, and I had to leave before I could install SP2.

IE8, if I remember correctly, had serious problems in the beginning, though. I know several people who updated and suddenly couldn't visit a great number of sites anymore. Instead they'd just get a blank white screen with no error message. Fortunately, IE8 is the first version I can remember that was as easy to uninstall as any other application (listed in Add/Remove like anything else), and the OS would revert to IE7. I recommended that for many people until the browser got straightened out.

IE8 is okay now, but it's still so very annoying. I particularly hate the initial screens you get after installing it. You're forced to walk through about 8 different steps just to get started.

Too bad it's so hard to get the average computer user to switch to Firefox of Chrome.


As for the Google news, it seems this has something to do with the China attacks. I've gotten mixed reports, though, about whether this vulnerability was just in IE6 or all versions of IE. Maybe that was all versions of Windows...