EC Considering Removing Internet Explorer From Windows

Itsabouttime writes "In a preliminary ruling, the European Commission told Microsoft that linking Internet Explorer to its dominant Windows operating system violates EC rules. The EC's ruling was triggered by a complaint from IE rival Opera. Microsoft could seek to offer a Windows version without IE, as it did in the EC's 2004 ruling on Windows Media Player."

Comments

Re:Slow Justice is No Justice

[CommentThingSucks]

That is because IE is not just the browser frontend, it is an entire framework that a lot of third party applications depend on.

This was done intentionally by Microsoft, even going so far as making important components like Explorer depend on it. This isn't really the case any more for most of Windows, but the third party programs still need it, so removing it would break a lot of programs people use.

Firefox is not a replacement either, because it does not implement any of the interfaces that the IE framework does (even though they could go to MSDN and implement them, but we're talking about a lot of work here.)

Now... you could remove the actual IE program itself, as few other programs depend on it, but what would be the point? To save a few megabytes?

I mean, there is already the option to remove access to it and use another browser as default. That's really all OEMs would need to ship a third-party browser (it would be problematic for Microsoft to do so.)