Windows 7 Compatibility Center: 17 markets in 12 languages to list over 100,000 products & new IE8 Tools

This post also appears at windowsteamblog.com

I'm pleased to announce we've expanded support for the Windows 7 Compatibility Center.  The fantastic Windows 7 momentum continues with a 150 million licenses sold to date, so ongoing support for the huge number of products that work with Windows is critical.

Since my first announcement on the Windows Compatibility Center and Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, we’ve had over 25 million visitors and have been busy adding thousands of compatible applications and devices to our database.  We now track over 100,000 consumer and business products across the globe.  While this is just a sample of everything available on Windows 7, we aim to provide compatibility information for the most popular products with links to software upgrades, device driver downloads, and help resources should you need them.

So here’s what we’re releasing today….

The Windows 7 Compatibility Center now supports searching and browsing over 100,000 products across 17 markets and 12 languages.  When visitors in Australia, Brazil, Canada (English & French), China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States go to www.windows.com/compatibility, they will automatically be directed to the market and language that matches their browser setting.  From there, visitors can search and browse applications and devices relevant to their local market or use the ‘market picker’ at the top of the page to see what’s available in other languages.

We also have a couple of new search tools for Internet Explorer 8 that hook right into the Compatibility Center. You can download this IE8 Search Provider to search from your browser’s toolbar and this IE8 Accelerator which lets you right-click a product’s name on any website to get instant results from the Compatibility Center. (These are only available in English for now.)

Finally, we really want to hear from our customers about how it’s going with your devices and applications on Windows 7, so we encourage you to let us know by using the Compatibly Center feedback forms. Also look for links to the Microsoft Answers forum where you can post questions and search for answers from the community and Microsoft folks.

Cheers, Mark