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IE Developer Responds to Mozilla Accusations
sriram_2001 writes "Dave Massy, a Microsoft employee who works on the Internet Explorer team has a response to the Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker's comments. Specifically, he responds to the claim that IE is a part of the operating system. 'IE is part of the Windows Operating System so that parts of the OS and other applications can rely on the functionality and APIs being present. To be clear there are no Operating System APIs that IE uses that are not documented on MSDN as part of the platform SDK and available to other browsers and any other software that runs on Windows..'
Uh, if mozilla supports vbscript then it would be allowed in mozilla or any other web browser for that matter. That does not make use of any unknown undocumented APIs. Try this, paste this code into a text file (hint: it came straight from your website):
Set oWMP = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7" )
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection
if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count - 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next ' cdrom
End If
wscript.echo "Automatic Cup Holder."
Then run "cscript filename". Oh my god, Microsoft tied vbscript into a stand alone application on your system!!! Give me a break, mod the parent down please
-dk
You can do that from windows explorer, and you could before IE was "part of the os," so that's a windows core function, not an IE function. As for browsing pages from a server like that, click on the files in the browser once you navigate to them.
Not to negate your post, but have you used any modern window manager that was big on eye candy? They use just as much ram as windows xp does. Mac OS X with less than 512mb of ram is a joke (heck,even with 512mb of ram it slows down when I fire up more than one resource intensive app) and KDE is just as bad. If you go back to Windows 95 or NT 4 before all these themed desktops came into light you wouldn't need half a gig of ram to show systray icons..
-dk
IE is part of the Windows Operating System so that parts of the OS and other applications can rely on the functionality and APIs being present.
Guys, uh guys, that's The Problem.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1776387,00. asp
To sum my thoughts in that story up, you have a gateway, IE, to the Internet that has deep, Inadequately Protected, connections to the core operating system.
IE, in specific, and Windows, in general, cannot be secured.
Microsoft's one seamless whole is really one giant security hole.
Steven
An article from 2003:
Microsoft allegedly opened up Windows APIs last year... Now, Devos claims that Microsoft's disclosures remain sufficiently inaccurate and incomplete for developers to continue using his own documentation.
Devos claims that Whirling Dervishes has discovered hidden Windows interfaces that are crucial for the development of such applications, but whose existence is denied by Microsoft. Not much change there then, post-lawsuit. These and other interfaces which Devos says should have been part of the API disclosures are used in NSELib, and he proposes to make public full documentation on how to use them.
Developers: We can use your help.
Nice. I read that in mud help files in 1994, only substitute all the modern technologies with mainframe jargon. I don't mind the update, but don't hijack it, paste a new face over the top of it, and try pass it off as your original work. That's very Microsoft of you.
They dont contradict each other. What it is saying is that IE is implemented using publically available OS API calls only, not secret ones as people have surmised, and that it is PART of the OS in order to provide some DIFFERENT API calls to third party applications.
The two statements bear no relation to each other, other than that they both relate to IE and APIs.
Simple answer. Turn off the eye-candy. It's pointless. I use WinXP with classic theme (and theme service turned off), and along with turning off other unneeded services, WinXP runs with a memory profile of about 70MB when idle with no apps loaded.
Now as you do want to run multiple apps, even 128MB isn't enough leeway - but I do get by fine with 256MB.
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Can somebody - Dave? - point me to the API that let IE4 add a "Favourites" item to the start menu in Windows 95? I don't mean something that was documented last year, I mean something that was documented ... in 1995. I don't think there is such an API. I don't think there ever was.
Can somebody - Dave? - tell me why the IE installer calls the undocumented Extract cabinet.dll function?
As far as I'm concerned this is all very simple. Could Netscape have done to Windows 95 what Microsoft did with IE4? Obviously the answer is no: IE did things that weren't just *adding* APIs, they were replacing core parts of the OS like Explorer in order to add the Favourites menu, Active Desktop etc etc. Dave is full of shit and the sad thing is, he probably believes his own story.
Here's a link to a copy of the original.