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."
You can already do this ... (Score:1, Insightful)
... for some definitions of "remove". I seriously doubt that Microsoft has decoupled the "internet explorer" feature set from the operating system, and would be surprised if "removal" meant any more than it already does ... hiding an icon.
Sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
And who has money on the OS not working right afterwards?
Disable IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Confucius say (Score:3, Insightful)
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 rights.
I'm not going to go as far and say that it will replace my XP install for gaming, but it is a good lowest common demoninator operating system that suzie q from accounting won't be miffed at.
Who knows, if w7 comes with firefox by default, the OS might be on track to reducing the amount of drive by infections. (I've received zero pings from worm infections on my antivirus from behind my router, and zero pings from when i was behind a dsl router that had built in NAT by default.)
Now about those pesky email spread viruses...
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.
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 can't use IE to surf the web, IE doesn't exist, at least from the user's point of view. The fact that IE components are still employed by the OS is beside the point. The point being that IE no longer has precedence over other web browsers.
Re:Disable IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why remove it alltogether? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:At last! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Got any examples?
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)
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...
But why would you want to? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I'm sure the EU will go after Apple too. Yeah. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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:Disable IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:HyperText but not HTML huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 help application I don't care.
It's not our fault that Microsoft intentionally did the help system and other Windows systems around IE to lock users into it. Users shouldn't suffer because of it.
Maybe you're too young but in WIndows 95, there was already a help system implemented (with HLP files, not the CHM files) that allowed people to go between help pages easily but didn't use IE.
Re:At last! (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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).
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.
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
Re:You can already do this ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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?
Here's my analogy: Your analogy is like an analogy about a murder that happened, except where you replace the murderer with a guy who just went to the shooting range and legally did some target practice.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:2, Insightful)
You may as well tell a Linux dev to not rely upon libc.
That's not an appropriate comparison. For all intents and purposes, libc is the userland side of the kernel. More appropriate is the vile piece of excrement /bin/bash, usually symlinked to /bin/sh. With some effort you can get /bin/sh linked to a decent shell, but you're in a world of pain if you attempt to remove it entirely from the system.
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: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:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 Windows live forever is open up their APIs. How many Microsoft Windows XP machines are going to be running on January 18, 2038?[1] I guarantee you there will be 32 bit Unix-derived systems running then. If I manage to live that long I'll certainly make sure I've built such a system just to watch The End Of Time(2) in realtime[2] to see what happens.
[1] 0, but there could well be some ReactOS ones.
[2] I had to demonstrate in advance that the machines I managed would not crash at the stroke of midnight 31-Dec-1999. It was not nearly as much fun as the real thing.
Re:Disable IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 posted here).
Microsoft Internet Explorer has worked very hard to get its world famous reputation for security and you probably are better off without any of its bits laying around on your system.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:3, Insightful)
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".