XP Service Pack Does the Impossible

Peyna writes "This article over at C|net discusses the upcoming Microsoft Windows XP service pack, which will contain the normal bug fixes, but more importantly, will make XP more modular, allowing you to override their default products. I assume this means Internet Explorer and possibly some other apps as well."

Comments

It isn't anything you can't do now.

[the-banker]

This SP does NOT make Windows more modular. It simply is a convenient interface to override default applications.

You can't uninstall IE or its libraries - they still will load on startup. What you can do is associate URLs to Moz or whatever.

This can all be done now, just not very conveniently for the average user. All the SP adds is a Control Panel applet to facilitate the association changing.

Marc

Could this keep Mozilla OUT???

[dr_funk]

According to this article, XP SP1 doesn't remove the apps, it just hides them. One of the FEATURES of the middleware hiding app is that other programs need to register themselves through a new API to be the default web browser or email client or media player etc... My question is will the API documentation have the same "Anti-OpenSource" clauses that MS has grown so fond of recently??? Would this prevent Mozilla from being the default browser??

What about the EULA?

[toupsie]

While this is a welcomed change for Microsoft to open up their operating system and play nice with third party companies, what has Microsoft done with the EULA for SP1? That is the real reason not to use XP -- not because it doesn't play nice with RealAudio. The XP EULA is affront to an individual's right to cpu privacy.