Windows 7 Lets You Uninstall IE8 474
CWmike writes "A just-leaked build of Windows 7 lets users remove Internet Explorer, the first time that Microsoft has offered the option since it integrated the browser with Windows in 1997, two bloggers reported today. The move might have been prompted by recent charges by the European Union that Microsoft has stifled browser competition by bundling IE with its operating system, the bloggers speculated. One solution under consideration by the EU would require Microsoft to disable IE if the user decided to install a different browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome. Microsoft had no comment when asked to confirm whether Windows 7 will let users dump IE8 or whether the option was in reaction to the EU charges."
At last! (Score:5, Funny)
A compelling feature to drag people away from XP.
Now only if it included a utility to uninstall Windows...
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it does. it's called "format c:"
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Re:At last! (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect it would fail when attempting to delete the deltree binary itself, or the directory it belongs to. Haven't tried, though.
(No such problem on Linux, of course; rm -rf / will happily wipe your entire fs, including the rm binary and the /bin directory.)
rm -rf / (Score:4, Informative)
(No such problem on Linux, of course; rm -rf / will happily wipe your entire fs, including the rm binary and the /bin directory.)
This is a "bug". Under recent POSIX revisions this is now considered incorrect behaviour (something about trying to follow "/." and "/.."):
http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck/entry/rm_rf_protection
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.
Re:rm -rf / (Score:5, Funny)
Cool! I think I'll try for myse
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argh, don't joke about it, I actually managed to do a rm -rf / on a our live server, serving all our webads to clients, (I typed in /home/foo/bar / , which deleted the dir bar as well as most whole drive before I managed to stop it with cntr-c).
All this while explaining the care one must take when using rm -rf while logged in as root to a junior developer.
The system actually continued to run, as all neccessary programs were still in memory.
Basically noone where allowed to touch it in case it'd brake while I
Re:rm -rf / (Score:4, Funny)
Tag: andnothingofvaluewaslost
Another bit of lore in danger of being lost (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a "bug". Under recent POSIX revisions this is now considered incorrect behaviour (something about trying to follow "/." and "/.."):
http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck/entry/rm_rf_protection [sun.com]
I didn't realize that had been changed recently. How sad. Another bit of Unix lore that only us old-timers will get to experience.
By their argument, `cd /; rm -rf .' still ought to work. Sigh. That lacks the drama, the feeling, the intensity of slamming down the return key knowing you're about to delete every file on the system. :-)
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.
Pathetic. But at least you get the source to rm(1) so you can fix that bug - or write your own, it's not that hard.
Now, get off my lawn.
Re:rm -rf / (Score:4, Informative)
This is not Debian-specific. Just RTFM of rm(1) from GNU Coreutils and you'll see the option --preserve-root is enabled by default. To override it use --no-preserve-root. Mine's coreutils-6.12 here.
Of course you can see this as another disadvantage of GNU.
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Damn, and here I am having already formatted my crappy Windows 7 partition. that would have been a bitching experiment to run on that POS.
For the record, this is not mindless MS bashing... I'm currently booted into XP which I use about 99% of the time for gaming and familiarity (it's frustrating and hard going from Windows power user to Linux n00b, sue me), and it's even a legal copy!* But when I installed the 7 Beta it was just crap... total crap. They can pry XP from my collection of ironic Charlton Hesto
Re:At last! (Score:5, Informative)
So to have more protection over temporary data in a program, open a file and then immediately unlink it - only programs that can manage to open it between(/at) its creation and unlinking from the directory structure will be able to access the data within it; this also leads to situations where the total space allocated on a disk [partition] (looking at, say df) can be much larger than is obviously apparent (using, say du) - this can happen if you have a large log file that is being written and you rm the directory entry for it: only when the program filling the log exits will the space be released.
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It will format everything except that c:\boot\ folder.
That doesn't belong to you! Didn't you read the EULA?
Re:At last! (Score:5, Interesting)
disclaimer: i dont currently use ubuntu....but have used it in the past
i'm not sure why people think ubuntu is any more bloated than any other mainstream linux distro. They run the same software stack and if you listed the running processes when you reached the GUI you'd probably find most mainstream linux distros are much the same.
Most linux distros including ubuntu are built from the same standard components, and sometimes there are modifications made such as improvements to specific software and also corporate branding on images etc.
Such modifications are usually minor in comparison to the original software, and its doubtful that they add much to the memory footprint or speed of the OS as a whole...generally speaking.
Please identify the 'cruft' you refer to in ubuntu and I'll happily be proven wrong.
Re:At last! (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm not sure why people think ubuntu is any more bloated than any other mainstream linux distro.
Canonical are basically going to get criticised no matter which approach they take: if they don't go for the kitchen-sink approach then Ubuntu isn't casual user friendly and shame on them for making people rely on package management; when it does it's considered too bloated and crufty.
It's a no-win situation, someone's always going to gripe.
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Canonical are basically going to get criticised no matter which approach they take: if they don't go for the kitchen-sink approach then Ubuntu isn't casual user friendly and shame on them for making people rely on package management; when it does it's considered too bloated and crufty.
Agreed. If they went to a minimalist install it'd be almost like starting a fresh windows install.. open a PDF *install Acrobat Reader*, edit text files *install Notepad++*, edit a picture *install Paint .NET* and so on. I want a decent bundle of applications and the added HDD space and updates don't bother me. If you really wanted a minimalist install I'm sure there's an option in the alternative installer somewhere to just install a minimalist system and apt-get your way from there.
If there was something
Re:At last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Confucius say (Score:5, Funny)
Man who remove Internet Explorer but not Windows is a little like Lance Armstrong: still one Ballmer remaining.
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No astroturf here, but on my 8 months removed from bleeding edge computer, (no I7 chip), windows 7 is leaps and bounds ahead of vista. Its *almost* on par with windows XP. Perhaps with a bit of learning, I could hollow out a corner in my cold dead heart for windows 7.
Anywho, its not AS bad as people are saying, in fact, it carries on XP's (well, much more linux's than XP's) tradition of only bugging you for admin rights when you need admin righ
Re:Confucius say (Score:4, Insightful)
Posting anonymously for reasons that are soon to be obvious.
Huh? I'm sorry, this isn't obvious at all. Is it because you made a pro-windows post and think you're going to get modded down? From what I've seen in my time here, well-thought-out posts that defend any OS seldom get modded down. Occasionally you'll get one or two downmods from zealots, but those will generally be corrected by later mods.
(I won't get into the silliness of posting anonymously to protect a fictitious karma number in the first place...
Re:Confucius say (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe he had mod points and wanted to mod himself up?
Sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
And who has money on the OS not working right afterwards?
Disable IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disable IE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled.
Ah, you may like it to be there. Not everyone does. And that's the crux of the matter... Having the freedom to choose. Which of course nobody cares about when they choose to go with the majority. Fortunately, the EU understands that the rights of minorities are more important.
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What is so problematic about having the IE binaries there?
It's another vector for attack.
I recall some years back, there was a group that was aggressively scanning the internet for blackhats and/or issuing some kind of challenge. They got pwned when an administrator's password got sniffed and the attacker got root on one of their servers from exploiting a stray gnome program (or something like that) that didn't get removed by accident. (I'm trying to recall the correct keywords to find a reference, but coming up short, I think an article about it may have been p
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Yeah, just in the summary:
"One solution under consideration by the EU would require Microsoft to disable IE if the user decided to install a different browser"
So, gee, I wonder why someone might think that was mentioned in the article, huh?
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Seriously? That's absolute crap. Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled.
What does what you want have to do with anything? I want a new car for $50, but that doesn't mean the cops are going to let me keep one if I buy a stolen one. MS's crime affects end users only indirectly.
The EU needs to get its head out of its a**.
Why? Because you assume MS's engineering choices have something to do with the punishment the EU will render for a crime MS hasn't even been convicted of yet and which the EU has not made any comments about what sort of punishment they intend?
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Seriously? That's absolute crap. Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled. The EU needs to get its head out of its a**. If I want IE disabled, I'll disable it.
WTF? Where did it say it was going to disable IE if you installed Firefox?
Some people like myself want - no, demand - the option to remove IE. (Even if no other browser is present!). The EU is simply doing what it can against Microsoft, who until now have seemed completely unwilling to bend.
Hopefully this means (Score:2)
they have removed the browser integration into core places.
Whether or not you use IE, that is a good thing.
Give me just an OS (Score:2)
This is a step in the right direction. Windows 7 should come with all of the bells and whistles we've come to expect, but give us the choice of what we want to install.
Without selecting any options, you just get an OS. I would have a lot more respect for the product.
Now eliminate any DRM nasties and I'll be very happy.
I sure hope so (Score:2)
New Prank (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like the newest prank to play on someone's computer will include uninstalling all of their browsers.
Only removes IEXPLORE.EXE loader stub (Score:2, Interesting)
Aw, come on, this only removes the IEXPLORE.EXE loader stub.
Still, this is start. And about damn time.
I'd like to see them fully drop all dependencies on IE from the desktop shell next. The help system would be the biggest problem though, but perhaps they can slowly move towards a version of windows that is not entirely dependent on IE again... but perhaps I am just still dreaming.
Happily posted from my Windows 95 machine with SeaMonkey 1.1.14... and NO STILL IE AT ALL!
HyperText but not HTML huh? (Score:2)
So wait, you want indexable, cross-linked help with the ability to jump from one useful piece of information to another, just like HTML? And you want MS to remove the HTML renderer?
So, what do you want everyone writing Windows Help to do? Learn another language so you can remove a file that already (mostly) works? What about the 20 billion old help files?
"Sorry Betty, the help for Office 2007 won't work on Windows 9 because linebackn wanted the HTML libraries to be removed from Windows."
Note that there's re
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They just need to create a new hh.exe executable (or whatever is used to open those help files in the background) and list it as important update for a specific application (Office, whatever) in Windows Updates.
The updated help application can very well use a custom made DLL file or several DLL files or internal code to render the contents of the help file. A simple library capable of showing text, links and jpg/gif images on a window is not that hard to do.
As long as these DLL files are only used by this h
Re:HyperText but not HTML huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the same code that should be removed should be moved instead. OK, I can grok that.
I'm quite a bit older than '95, having cut teeth on Windows 2.x (Excel). I much preferred DOS, as did most of the sane.
But .HLP had its own set of issues, primarily around authoring and maintenance, and the indexing sucked. And under the hood it was basically a case of supporting a bastardised HTML anywhere. I think I prefer having 1 language, and one codebase.
Also it occurred to me after I posted that if you ensure Windows has no method of interpreting HTML out of the box, then you will assuredly end up with tens or hundreds of different HTML engines. Each must be updated, patched and managed. I don't believe this is a reasonable approach. HTML is common enough that I believe it should be a basic part of a client OS.
Re:Only removes IEXPLORE.EXE loader stub (Score:4, Insightful)
How about when IE crashes it DOESN'T take down file explorer with it? That is my single biggest non -security gripe with IE and the most obvious noticeable flaw in this embed-ie-in-everything approach
I don't understand what is so complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems the astroturfers are going crazy trying to confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with end users. The important thing the EU is trying to get is for OEM's to have the ability to replace IE with (or add to IE) Firefox or some other browser.
Let's repeat this carefully:
1. An OEM (like Dell) must be able to load the computer with arbitrary programs, some of which compete with Microsoft's world domination plans, without Microsoft being able to punish them by changing the terms of their OEM contract.
2. This has NOTHING to do with what users do with their machine after they get it home. Astroturfers are trying to say this has something to do with installing alternative browsers, or some kind of installation switch to allow the users to choose, or other bullshit. That is just to make it sound like the EU is forcing the machines to be "hard to use". In fact it is making the machine easier to use because it allows end users to not have to do the "hard" installation step, this difficulty is in fact a major part of Microsoft's lock-in.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
4. It does sound like the truth is that IE is somewhat more "integrated" than just the existence of libraries, and thus Microsoft had to do some work so that everything works if the ie.exe file is missing (such as apparently removing the ability to choose it as the default browser if it is missing). Good for them, they are obeying the rules.
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I think you have a pretty good grasp on the situation and I tend to agree there are astroturfers here. Some of the most outrageous comments are from users who only comment on stories about Microsoft.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
I'm not 100% convinced on this one. Likely the EU will ignore the libraries, but they are (technically) still an antitrust issue. Since MS can provide their HTML rendering libraries with every copy of Windows while other vendors cannot, developers rely upon MS's version which is not in compliance with published
Re:I don't understand what is so complicated (Score:4, Informative)
That was the case up until IE 7, but I things changed more there. And iexplore.exe and explorer.exe have always had separate process spaces, even back in the IE6 days. (Very important since an explorer.exe browser crashing requires restarting all of explorer.exe including the desktop. That gets very annoying, so using IE processes to browse the web have always been a good idea.)
And technically, IE6 was still a seperate program that just ran the same code as explorer.exe did for both browser and file modes.
When IE 7 is installed the explorer.exe is prevented from entering a web-browser mode. While the trident engine remains in the Windows core, the UI engine that IE7 uses is completely different. With IE7 and an old copy of IE6's iexplore.exe one can load the old IE 6 UI, but the IE 7 version of the trident engine is still used. The fact that the iexplore.exe of ie 6 can use browser mode, but explorer.exe cannot after the installation of IE7 does show that iexplore.exe has always been more than a stub.
Turning off != uninstalling...or is it? (Score:2)
From what I have seen, what Microsoft have implemented is "turning off" Internet Explorer. "Turning off" has never been equal to "uninstalling."
What is to prevent Microsoft from issuing an update possibly via a third party software vendor which update will "turn on" Internet Explorer once again?
I am not convinced...yet.
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yeah and what's to stop Apple from re-offering to install Safari in their software updates (only using QuickTime) after I uninstall Safari?
*yawn*
The same would apply to Firefox is Firefox was getting peddled somewhere that I knew of.. is Chrome being peddled by Google Earth updates yet?
Windows 7 for me so far (Score:2, Offtopic)
I built a new rig and installed Windows 7 and openSUSE 11.1. I don't have XP x64 installed currently, though I may move to it. So far, many of my games just won't work properly. UAC is not magically better now, though you are harassed less.
I was copying files from my old computer. I created a samba share to copy files from. I create a new folder in my Windows 7 machine that I have access to write to. I start copying a couple thousand songs, and it stops partially though saying I have no rights on the
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many of my games just won't work properly.
Can you give us some samples? This just doesn't seem right, considering I've been able to run the everything from the OpenGL version of Quake 1 to some obscure TI 99/4a emulators.
Explorer not only crashes at least once a day
Try ShellExView [nirsoft.net]. It will allow you to see what 3rd party extensions might be hooked to explorer, which is a classic cause of explorer related stability problems.
C:\Users\Public. Brilliant.
This was introduced with Vista.
Hardly new. (Score:2)
That's been there as long as I can remember. Obviously it won't remove the underlying components but then - I wouldn't expect it to. I also wouldn't expect Windows 7 to do so, since the underlying components server to form the foundation of the windows HTML rendering that many, many third party applications depend on.
Re:Hardly new. (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is that even if you did that, certain programs would still launch IE (Autodesk's feedback utitlity for software crashes for example) instead of the default system browseer.
IE != Gecko. Gecko is used to render help files and other system-wide things that need an HTML rendering engine (same think as WebKit on OSX), but that does not mean that the IE application needs to be present to do so.
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Errr... Trident that is. Gecko is Mozilla's rendering engine. Too many hours staring at CSS today....
But why would you want to? (Score:3, Insightful)
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But why would you want to?
I can think of three reasons:
Re:what about accessing windowsupdate via browser? (Score:5, Informative)
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But, Windows Update, along with all those warm fuzzy programs written in Microsoft languages, use Microsoft DLL's to do things. They'll leave behind all the DLL's, or everything will break, so all that's missing may (may) be only the iexplore.exe
Yippie skippie.
Re:what about accessing windowsupdate via browser? (Score:4, Informative)
At least be informed in your trolling.
Re:what about accessing windowsupdate via browser? (Score:5, Informative)
Server core still has IE libraries - for instance, WinInet which basically is a standard internet connectivity library is there. Hell, even Hyper-V server (the OS that is free and can only run Hyper-V) will actually get offered some IE updates - because some IE components are still part of the OS. Iexplore.exe isn't there, but other chunks are there because substantial parts of the OS (and even third-party applications) use them.
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:5, Informative)
Read the article. They state that iexplore.exe is gone.
Sure, some libraries will stick around. They have to, otherwise a lot of applications will break. You can't "decouple" a dependency from applications without breaking them. But IE was never integrated into the kernel; it was integrated into the shell. I know that doesn't jive with your particular interpretation of the definition of an "operating system", but that is the reality of the situation.
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:5, Informative)
The kernel isn't the operating system. That's the basis of the GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate.
That said, this seems to be functionally comparable to deleting the Safari.app on a Mac - the application is gone and cannot be launched, but the rendering engine sticks around because it's used elsewhere in the operating system for other tasks.
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Re:You can already do this ... (Score:4, Insightful)
the rendering engine sticks around because it's used elsewhere in the operating system for other tasks
Meaning, of course, it's still there to be exploited by anything that exploits IE rendering bugs.
Yes, just like bugs in OpenSSL can be exploited if you have applications that load that library, even after other applications that use that library have been uninstalled. Of course, security patches will be released to fix those bugs, which is why it's important to stay up to date.
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:5, Interesting)
That was what people were saying for ages. There is almost no way to remove mshtml (the real ie) from an up and running Windows OS.
It was possible, one Aussie teacher made a state of art .inf file and called it Win98 lite. It was even mentioned in court by judge. In fact, it could impress anyone since the speed of OS actually skyrocketed.
MS was unhappy of course and they built this massive IT conspiracy making sure it will never happen again and they would easily say ''Order us to remove? Well, see what happens when it is removed''. With lazy Windows developers and gecko.dll never stabilizing enough like todays Firefox or Apple Webkit, the plot worked fine.
If one installs Windows of any kind today, he should never pass any IE updates since it is there, working and massively linked even by Microsoft's most die-hard rivals.
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Got any examples?
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I am not watching current Windows scene too closely but I remember AOL applications always linking to MSHTML, even their most popular applications of their time. Today, vendors don't even feel the need of writing ''MS IE required'' as they assume it must be already there.
Perhaps pushing MS to truly remove IE is unrealistic, pushing them to make it like Apple Webkit/Safari in terms of both being open and closed with their (MS) own open source terms is the way to go? I am not saying GPL or even Apache. Well,
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That would be sad.
Maybe not, they coupled it to avoid lawsuits and it is a bad and expensive architecture to maintain.
I almost don't want to say it, but it looks like MS might becoming around to an actual micro kernel design.
The sheer cost of there current nightmare to maintain the OS could benefit us all.
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Actually, the IE feature set isn't as pervasive as it used to be. For example Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser) used to treat folders as a kind of web page. If you wanted to customize a folder, you editing its style sheets and added VBS scripts. Lots of nice exploits there, which is why it no longer works.
On the other hand, I sometimes get an IE security warning when I right click on network files served by Samba. It appears that IE plays a role in displaying context menus!
Still, if the user
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Yeah thats a Zone warning. The originating zones for files (and also the zones policy can be applied to for managed code) mirror the IE zones. (Internet / Local Machine / Intranet / Trusted Sites / etc).
Why remove it alltogether? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you shouldn't rely on it, then? Detect whether it's available upon installation. If it is, use it - if not, install and use a different layout engine (gecko, webkit, whatever)
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Because that's a pain in the ass and utterly unnecessary?
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Whats the COM+ UUID for gecko? Does it expose the same interfaces?
Can I deploy it myself, or will I have to GPL my app?
Riiiiight! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know a how long it takes to get permission to use or even link users to download a piece of software? So many potential liability issues that a multibillion dollar product has to deal with?
Idealist heaven for you as it might be, it's pure hell for the developers.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:5, Insightful)
So then everyone has to distribute an engine with their apps or assume everyone has a net conection? Which engine? Will I end up with three or four render engines on my Windows desktop just like I have Qt, GTK+, GTK2 and whatever else on my Linux ones? Reminds me of all the software discs with "IE4 included!"
How about the option to remove the network stack or the window manager? The file manager? MS has a monopoly on file managers because Win comes with one preinstalled! To me, it's all part of the product they're selling, so I shouldn't complain if it comes with whatever feature they sold to me(bugs aside).
Obligatory car analogy: I think Ford should stop selling cars with alternators. Other parts of the car rely on having electricity to run, but what if I don't like the one they sold to me in my car?
Maybe MS should just improve the quality of its rendering engine.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe MS should just improve the quality of its rendering engine.
Lo and behold, they did! IE8 passes ACID2. It's still behind all the other major browsers, but they're actually working on trying to catch up.
Remember that no major browser has a currently-shipping release version that passes ACID3; Safari 4 beta and Opera 10 alpha don't count quite yet. It's been argued that Firefox scores higher than IE, but the reality is that neither of them will pass any time soon. IE8 really doesn't look too bad in this light - it's a couple years behind the curve, but only a couple years.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:5, Interesting)
So many strawmen, so little time...
One, Ford does not have a monopoly, therefore they are not subject to the restrictions put on monopoly players.
Two, does it really make a difference to you if you have three or four render engines on your desktop? The space used is negliegable today. Different from the different GUI systems you list for comparison, you'd not notice very much anyways.
Three, the file-manager-monopoly is entirely misleading. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Leveraging it to drive out competition is.
Four, this is not a matter of quality. Even if IE were the absolut best browser around, it would still be the same problem, except maybe that MS wouldn't drag the matter out over years and do every legal and some illegal tricks on the book to avoid a judgement, because they actually could win in the market. Again, this is not a matter of quality, but of protecting the free market from one of its worst enemies: A monopoly player.
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Why is it people think they can make an analogy about a case of antitrust abuse, but replacing a trust with a company that doesn't have a monopoly?
Possibly because it exposes the stupidity of "remedies" that will do nothing more than harm users, and the farce of "establishing a level playing field".
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:5, Funny)
> ... 6 apps that I have that will break, off the top of my head.
You may want to move your head out of the way - you're liable to get a concussion.
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So what leads you believe it won't come with one?
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Why remove the core libraries? We develop several applications which rely on it, and users will blame us if app doesn't work out of the box.
That's why. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc. don't have the option of making sure they're installed on every Windows system and their APIs are always available to companies doing development (like you). As a result you use IE instead of the best browser/engine/API available. That undermines the market for Web browsers.
That's not to say the EU will make MS remove them. They could make MS include all browsers and rendering engines, or open up the APIs and remove the libraries, but allow OEMs to drop in a replace
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are now confusing a DHTML rendering component with a browser application.
The COM interfaces for IE are well-defined and there is nothing stopping anyone exposing identical interfaces from their own components. Bit of a bloody waste of time if you ask me.
Also I'm not sure if I'm too interested in having to look at a bunch of licenses for linking directly to Firefox libraries or whatever...
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa, hold on there. Microsoft killing the browser market? Sure, no debates there.
Microsoft killing the DHTML renderer component market? Possibly. The same as they are killing the common-control market, the shell market, etc. Where do you draw the line?
I don't see people advocating removal of comctrl32.dll, or comdlg32... (Not to say they won't start whinging next). IMO a DHTML rendering control is part of providing a complete UI widget set - which is something that an application platform has to provide. Period. The MSHTML COM component *should* be part of the standard distribution (as it is NOT ie).
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It isn't the rendering engines.
A lot of stuff ships as part of the IE package. Depending on the OS, there are UI and networking pieces that may be changed out when you go to the next IE.
One of the teams at work was having trouble getting SSL working on XPe systems. I advised them to install the IE package and things were OK....
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open up the APIs and remove the libraries, but allow OEMs to drop in a replacement set of libraries of their choice
That's the sensible thing to do. One of the many innovations of Unix was that it was the first operating system to have the primary user interface (shell) be just a regular program. No ties to the kernel other than libc (or an equivalent as all the system calls were documented). /etc/shells is only an administrative thing - it's perfectly fine to use things like XEmacs as a login shell (see my comments in src/emacs.c :-), for example.
The dirty secret is that all Microsoft has to do to make Microsoft Windo
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:5, Informative)
Why couldn't this slashdot post point to the two people who actually came up with this? CWMike provided no original insight whatsoever.
Original sites referenced by CW's article:
http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/03/ie8-functionally-removable/ [aeroxp.org]
http://chris123nt.com/2009/03/03/win7-build-7048-ie8-is-removable/ [chris123nt.com]
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How do you uninstall a program and all the dependencies it installs in Linux?
Not being an ass - i'm just genuinely curious. I've never found a way easier than windows.
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How do you uninstall a program and all the dependencies it installs in Linux?
Not being an ass - i'm just genuinely curious. I've never found a way easier than windows.
apt-get purge program
apt-get autoremove
That should work for apt-based distros.
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Or you use Synaptic, right click the package, and click the option saying remove the program entirely including configuration files.
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In all fairness, I'm not a Mac fan, but Mac wins here. You uninstall an app by deleting the folder. End of story. It's gone.
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Not quite; a number of apps put stuff outside of the .app wrapper directory. Anything that loads a kernel extension (vmware, for example), as well as other application that put frameworks in /Library and /System/Library. And then there's prefs and cache files left over in your own Library directory.
Still, it's significantly better than it is on windows.
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Not exactly. You'll still have references in /LIBRARY/APPLICATION SUPPORT and in /USERS/username/LIBRARY, so you still have to hunt around and delete stuff if you want it all gone.
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I have.... Many times:
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and the application data folder?
what about the localstore?
did it place any files in %windir% or %sysdir%?
did it make any file extension associations?
did it add any environment variables?
etc.
crap cleaner won't clean -all- of that up.
That said, the original poster's comment was bunk; an uninstallation isonly as good as the uninstall routine. If it doesn't delete -all- files / remove -all- registry entries, etc. set upon install, then that's an issue with the uninstaller, not with the host OS.
I'm sure that so
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registry hacking
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Depends on the application/installer... but you should also check:
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\*
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Application Data\*
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Application Data\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Temp\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\SendTo\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Templates\* (Hidden)
Sometimes:
?:\Documents and Settings\All Users\
As well as:
?:\Program Files\Common Files\*
?:\Progr
Re:Windows updates? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:No IE? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it would have been at least 1$ cheaper and/or actually available in stores, it would have been more successful.
At least in my country Romania, where all stores receive free advertising money, billboards, promotional content and get lower prices if they don't sell computers with Linux pre-installed, every store only advertises Home and Premium versions of operating systems. The N versions are never in stock and if you really want to order them, it takes probably two weeks for the store to receive it from the Microsoft importer in the capital of the country.
Well, anyways unless people buy it for a company computer, people get laptops or computers with FreeDOS preinstalled (as there's law in the country saying all pc's must have OS installed) and then they pirate the OS or use Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux.
It's one thing to impose Microsoft the need of offering that N version, if you don't impose them to advertise it in equal amount with the regular version and to actually manufacture the physical discs.
I would personally buy a Windows 7 version without IE but completely without it, not just having iexplore.exe removed.
I would then laugh when I see Yahoo Messenger no longer works, the help system in Windows no longer works, Visual Studio's help no longer works, all the junk internal websites using proprietary IE stuff at my old work place no longer working and so on and so forth.
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Safari comes with OSX.
Please come back with an educated opinion once you know what MS's crime is. There is no law against bundling a Web browser with an OS. There is a law against undermining a market by tying a monopolized market with an un-monopolized market.
This is a big stink about nothing.
How would you know? You admit you don't understand what MS is doing that is illegal. So how would you know they aren't guilty or that the law is not a just and important one?