More on customised IE7
Microsoft have made mention of the ‘IE7 optimized for Google‘ which was recently brought to my attention through a posting on Blake’s blog.
Yahoo was the first company I spotted doing this, also USAtoday and web.de also have their own customised versions of the browser. These versions have been made using the IE Administration Kit which allows distributors to customise copies of the browser with things such as a different homepage, bookmarks and additional toolbars. It’s a fairly simple to use tool (Mozilla has a Client Customization Kit for Firefox but it’s not very well promoted), and in past versions of IE was often used for ISP installation CD’s (and often abused - for example previous versions of the IEAK could add an InfoPane to Outlook Express, basically all it was used for for adding an adbar to the mail client that only could be used via the registry). These days it’s rare for ISP’s to distribute CD’s so the IEAK is mostly used by corporates to customise the browser before rollout (although most the important stuff can be done via group policies).
As mentioned previously, I couldn’t see the benefit for Yahoo to be promoting this, never mind Google. Why would Google be wanting to support a company thats CEO wants to crush them? The Google customised version of Firefox is 10MB less to download than their similar IE offering.