Max Stevens, Internet Explorer Lead Program Manager has announced on the IEBlog that the latest Microsoft browser release will be plagued by issues related to add-on integration. Microsoft has launched Internet Explorer Release Candidate 1 earlier this week and even then the technical team has emitted a warning concerning compatibility issues. While the Redmond Company will provide support for the seamless integration of browser extension, this will be an assiduous and long term process correlated with the developers' own efforts to make plug-in integration viable. In this regard, as IE7 RC1 is in actuality an accurate variant of the browser's final version, some compatibility issues will translate to the completed product.

"We investigate all that we find and for those issues that we can't fix ourselves we attempt to contact the provider of the add-on and alert them to the issue as well. Unfortunately, there are some issues that neither the provider of the add-on nor us can easily fix, and for those issues that cause IE7 to crash or hang we felt we needed to provide some mechanism to help you, the user, keep browsing. With RC1, we've introduced a new feature that proactively looks for any installed add-ons that cause issues and warns the user on startup," stated Stevens.

The browser's automated defective add-on management function kicks in at application start and presents the user with various alternatives according to the problems encountered. If the add-on related issues are limited to a select scenarios the user is allowed to run the extension. "For add-ons that both Microsoft and the add-on provider agree cause particularly serious issues (an example might be preventing IE from even starting), we don't provide the ability to run with the add-on enabled. An example here is version 1.0.1507 of the IE developer toolbar. This old version caused hangs and crashes in IE7," explained Stevens.