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."
So there goes the whole... (Score:1, Interesting)
Too late to go after them for perjury on it?
Windows updates? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
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!
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 replacement set of libraries of their choice (with some reengineering of Windows required of MS to make it happen). Or they could let MS keep the libraries but require them to conform to Web standards according to preset rules and set someone to make sure MS does that. Or they could do something else entirely.
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.
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:Windows 7 for me so far (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't understand what is so complicated (Score:3, Interesting)
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 standards. This is less of an issue than browsers today, but as Web applications and services expand, it could be a serious issue with regard to hybrid programs which have both a Web and local application component or which are Web applications that rely upon newer Web technologies that allow for offline use of online apps. Alternatively, MS's leveraging of Windows to push their HTML renderer could prevent those standards from gaining ground and instead promote proprietary alternatives.
In short, I'm unconvinced a truly effective remedy will ignore these libraries. It could mandate that they be made into a plug-in style API where OEMs could drop in the libraries of their choice or the EU could allow MS to keep them bundled but regulate their compliance with a certain level of published standards.
Re:Why remove it alltogether? (Score:1, Interesting)
Whoa, hold on there. Microsoft killing the browser market? Sure, no debates there.
Not killing, illegally influencing... and no there isn't much debate about it among people who understand economics or antitrust law. MS is going to lose this one in record time. It is open and shut.
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?
The line is defined by markets as antitrust law applies to markets and there are not laws specific to every single kind of market (nor are they needed). MS cannot tie their monopoly to any product from a separate, preexisting market at the time they gained a monopoly or tied the product. Was there a separate market for shell environments when MS started bundling their OS with one and did MS have monopoly influence on the desktop OS market at that time?
How can you have an opinion on this topic if you don't even have a basic understanding of the laws in question?
IMO a DHTML rendering control is part of providing a complete UI widget set - which is something that an application platform has to provide.
Law and economic theory don't care about technical definitions of OS's or components, just markets. It's a lot simpler that way.
. Period.
Period period period?
When speaking, I can understand saying the punctuation "period" as emphasis. When writing, it is just silly and redundant.
The MSHTML COM component *should* be part of the standard distribution (as it is NOT ie).
First, whether or not bundling it is illegal is based solely on if their was a preexisting market for such rendering engines, separate from Windows. Even if there was not, it might still be addressed in some fashion as part of the punishment for the crime to help undo the damage done by MS's illegal actions. Remember, whenever we talk about removing things from Windows or including things from other vendors or restricting how MS implements things, it is as part of a punishment for breaking the law, not an attempt to regulate how companies do things in general. Criminals are often ordered to do things that would be unjust restrictions for non-criminals (like forcing people to live in prison cells).
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: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:rm -rf / (Score:1, Interesting)
Just tried it on Arch Linux (coreutils 7.1) which is in a VM so I was sure to take a snapshot first:
[andrew@newton ~]$ sudo rm -rf / .... rm -rf /* certainly works though
rm: cannot remove root directory '/'
Re:At last! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 to discuss, it'd be their willingness to push in new systems like pulseaudio, dropping support for KDE3 and various other build options. Personally I'm running a mix of hardy/intrepid7jaunty right now to get what I want. Anyway, my impression is that most of what Ubuntu does is purely optional - if you like it, use it and if you don't there are distros that are much truer to upstream, mostly because it's less work. After all this is Linux, the OS with a million distributions. Nobody survives pushing things the users don't want for long.
Re:rm -rf / (Score:3, Interesting)
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 build a mirror of the server on a VPS, which we switched over to while rebuilding the real server.
THese were moments of agony
Re:rm -rf / (Score:2, Interesting)
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.