Microsoft Busting Its Own Browser+OS Myth 204
Posted
by
timothy
from the in-sepa-rable dept.
from the in-sepa-rable dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley used her Redmond magazine column this month to point out that after years of arguing that the browser is 'inextricably linked' to the operating system, the company's current push to get users to drop IE 6 for newer versions, plus IE's separate release schedule, are disproving its own argument. From the article: 'Microsoft has insisted that its browser is part of Windows, and, ironically, that's coming back to haunt the company. Customers can mix and match different versions of IE with different versions of Windows. ... But Microsoft has done very little to get this message out there. I'd argue this is because it makes plain the absurdity of the company's claims that IE is part of Windows.'"
ILLOGICAL (Score:2, Interesting)
'Microsoft has insisted that its browser is part of Windows, and, ironically, that's coming back to haunt the company. Customers can mix and match different versions of IE with different versions of Windows.....But Microsoft has done very little to get this message out there. I'd argue this is because it makes plain the absurdity of the company's claims that IE is part of Windows.'"
Fallacious logic!
Internet Explorer is part of Windows and not Internet Explorer 6 is part of Windows.
Customers are just plain lazy or the IT departments just don't care if its IE6 or IE9 on 3 year old systems they just attend to when it's broken down.
I think the whole post is not worth news for a nerd. There is no logic to this argument and should be trashed.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing is, I have a quote from a Microsoft patent application that occurred around the same time they were arguing in court that the browser was part of the OS: "It should be understood by those skilled in the art that a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, ... is separate from the operating system." Man, I wish I'd recorded the patent application number when I put that in my quotes file.
Re:Um no... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that anyone disbelieved Microsoft when they claimed that IE had been made part of the OS. No one is really calling that a myth. The supposed myth is that it had to be part of the OS, and that Microsoft could not make a meaningful distinction between the browser and the OS.
Still, we can argue about whether Microsoft claimed such a thing or whether it really is a "myth".
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Interesting)
More to the point, the Justice Dept pulled the experienced lawyers off the case once the Bush Administration took over in 2001.
One suspects it was for ideological reasons, Republicans being known for favoring big business.
Re:Why should they care now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. As a greybeard old enough to have used 98Lite to "hot rod" systems I can say that even back then you could remove it easy enough, but without MSHTML.dll and related files on the system many programs that were not made by MSFT simply wouldn't run or would die hard. In the days of dialup it was simply better to have a rendering engine built into the OS because as anyone on the dialup back then would tell you, even small downloads were slooooow buddy.
I frankly never understood why so much focus was on IE during the trail, when IMHO there were much better smoking guns, such as tying OEM licenses to PCs sold, not copies of Windows sold. That little trick effectively killed BeOS and made sure the only thing you were getting from an OEM was Windows. Now that they can no longer do that trick (and I personally hope Intel gets busted for their OEMs backroom dealing) frankly I think MSFT should be able to put whatever programs they want into their OS. After all it isn't like you have to buy Windows, there is OSX, Linux, BSD, etc, and plenty of places like System76 that will be happy to sell non-MSFT equipment to you, just as there is FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Kmeleon, Flock, etc.
I'm just glad the days of "This site requires IE" are dying hard IE6 can't die fast enough IMHO. The only nice thing I can say about IE is it makes switching people to FF that much easier. Just an hour ago I finished up a service call to the nice retired NASA engineer down the hall. After using IE since Win95 I switched him over to FF. After seeing how easy it was to block ads and add specialized searches he was sold. BTW does anyone know of any good "deep web" search engines I can point him towards? He is doing geology research and needs to get more "off the beaten path" to find the kind of data he requires for the paper he's working on. I'm afraid geology and deep web isn't something I have experience in, so any pointers would be helpful.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:2, Interesting)
With the rise of Apple and Google signaling Microsoft's natural decline, the Justice Department's actions have turned out to be correct. The free market rejected the monopoly on its own without the need for government intervention like splitting up the company and other ridiculous solutions being thrown around back then.
So what about older PCs with little RAM? (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I have an old Toshiba Libretto 110CT. The specs: Pentium-MMX, 233MHz, 64MB RAM, 160GB PATA HD (I upgraded for the better access rate, since it only supports PIO mode), 802.11b WiFi... Going above 64MB RAM is not an option (excluding one hack that requires soldering and could bring it up to a massive 96MB). It's a neat little toy, especially for DOS games, and works reasonably well with XP Pro, Office XP, WordPerfect 11, etc.--especially after I disable 7 unnecessary services. Firefox 3.6 is painful on it, but it runs better than earlier versions of Firefox due to improvements in Javascript. IE6 runs reasonably well--better than Firefox. So, I'm curious--is IE7 or IE8 worth a try on this thing?
I know IE7 sucks with Javascript, so should I just go to IE8? Has anyone even tried IE7/8 on a very low end PC that barely meets XP & IE specs? Even IE8 says it needs only 64MB RAM. (I still need access to Windows Update and the occasional website...)
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:3, Interesting)
That must be why Windows is still ~90% of the market, with a similar share for Office.
Which kind are you?
http://www.leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-of-libertarian/ [leftycartoons.com]
They sabotaged the removal tool (Score:2, Interesting)
But my roommate, at the time, did Windows installations on grey boxes full-time. He discovered that if you used the IE3 uninstaller, IE4 would uninstall just fine, leaving a completely usable system (as far as Win95 was concerned). This means that Microsoft added something to the IE4 uninstaller to willfully break machines that uninstalled iE4.
The creation of an IE-free version for the European market also underlies their claims.
Nonetheless, it does remain a legally perilous path for Microsoft to expressly admit that IE really isn't tied to the operating system.