Internet Explorer 7, scheduled for launching sometime next week, is tailor fitted on the international market. The statistics speak for themselves. Internet Explorer accounts for either a 85.85% share
of the browser market in September according to OneStat or is continuing to lose market share hitting a low of 82.10% as Market Share by net Applications indicates. The reality is that, with a presence of +80% of the global browser market, coordinated with an even higher rate of Windows operating system deployment, IE7 is… well… international.
The browser's support for International Domain Names is an illustrative example of the IE's global status. Moreover, Microsoft has updated the current values for the Accept-Language header.
“Accept-Language is an HTTP header sent to the server by the browser to indicate the user’s language and locale. As an example, the Accept-Language header sent by the browser of a native French speaker in France and fluent in German might be: Accept-Language=fr-FR,de-DE;q=0.5. A server, upon receiving such a header, should return French content if available, or German content if French content is not available,” explained Eric Lawrence, Microsoft Program Manager.
The Accept-Language header's default value is directly dependent on the Windows default locale. But Microsoft allows for customization of the native language displayed in the address bar. The language settings can be customized either via the settings page following the installation of IE7 or via the Internet control Panel.
“In IE6, most of the choices in the Language Preference list specified a locale-neutral two letter code. For instance fr was sent for French (France), and ja sent for Japanese. Longer codes were only used when a language is commonly spoken in another country or locale-- for instance fr-CA was available for French-speaking Canadians,” added Lawrence.
Internet Explorer 7 works in a different manner, optimizing the identification of content for a specific language and locale by web servers. This is the result of the browser transmitting complete language/locale pair for each locale.
