Microsoft Lead Program Manager, Christopher Vaughan has made an entry on the IEBlog addressing the issues of the Internet Explorer 6 lifecycle. In this context, he stated that the release of Internet Explorer 7 will not impact directly the lifecycle of its predecessor. "Will Microsoft continue to provide security updates for IE6 after IE7 ships?" and "Will customers have to migrate to IE7 by some point in time?" are two of the questions Vaughan answered in the blog.

According to Microsoft, IE6SP1's support policy will not be altered with the launching of IE7. However, Vaughan did acknowledge that Microsoft's support for Internet Explorer 6 is correlated with the lifecycle of the operating system it runs on. "Everywhere that IE6SP1 is supported today, IE6SP1 will continue to be supported until the OS it ships with expires. Are you running IE6SP1 on Windows 2000 SP4? You will continue to get support for IE6SP1 until Windows 2000 expires (slated expiration: 2010). Are you running IE6SP1 on Windows XP SP1? You will continue to get support there until it expires in October," wrote Vaughan.

The Redmond Company assured IE6 SP1 users that if they are running Windows XP Service Pack 2, an expiration date for the product is not on the horizon. Additionally, Vaughan stated that while IE7 will be delivered via Windows Automatic Updates by default, the migration will not be forced and users will have control over the upgrade.