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Windows 7 Lets You Uninstall IE8
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."
...you don't use the browser for updates anymore. You haven't since XP.
Read the article. They state that iexplore.exe is gone.
Sure, some libraries will stick around. They have to, otherwise a lot of applications will break. You can't "decouple" a dependency from applications without breaking them. But IE was never integrated into the kernel; it was integrated into the shell. I know that doesn't jive with your particular interpretation of the definition of an "operating system", but that is the reality of the situation.
The kernel isn't the operating system. That's the basis of the GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate.
That said, this seems to be functionally comparable to deleting the Safari.app on a Mac - the application is gone and cannot be launched, but the rendering engine sticks around because it's used elsewhere in the operating system for other tasks.
Wrong. Server Core has no IE, and it isn't just "iexplorer.exe" that's not there.
At least be informed in your trolling.
Looks like the newest prank to play on someone's computer will include uninstalling all of their browsers.
-- lol pwned
Uh, they already did that a few years ago, beginning with Vista. Windows Update is completely decoupled from the web browser. It runs as a standalone Control Panel applet.
I suspect it would fail when attempting to delete the deltree binary itself, or the directory it belongs to. Haven't tried, though.
(No such problem on Linux, of course; rm -rf / will happily wipe your entire fs, including the rm binary and the /bin directory.)
Score: i, Imaginary
Well, the parent articles covered this, which leads me to my point:
Why couldn't this slashdot post point to the two people who actually came up with this? CWMike provided no original insight whatsoever.
Original sites referenced by CW's article:
http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/03/ie8-functionally-removable/
http://chris123nt.com/2009/03/03/win7-build-7048-ie8-is-removable/
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
(No such problem on Linux, of course; rm -rf / will happily wipe your entire fs, including the rm binary and the /bin directory.)
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
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.
That was the case up until IE 7, but I things changed more there. And iexplore.exe and explorer.exe have always had separate process spaces, even back in the IE6 days. (Very important since an explorer.exe browser crashing requires restarting all of explorer.exe including the desktop. That gets very annoying, so using IE processes to browse the web have always been a good idea.)
And technically, IE6 was still a seperate program that just ran the same code as explorer.exe did for both browser and file modes.
When IE 7 is installed the explorer.exe is prevented from entering a web-browser mode. While the trident engine remains in the Windows core, the UI engine that IE7 uses is completely different. With IE7 and an old copy of IE6's iexplore.exe one can load the old IE 6 UI, but the IE 7 version of the trident engine is still used. The fact that the iexplore.exe of ie 6 can use browser mode, but explorer.exe cannot after the installation of IE7 does show that iexplore.exe has always been more than a stub.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Server core still has IE libraries - for instance, WinInet which basically is a standard internet connectivity library is there. Hell, even Hyper-V server (the OS that is free and can only run Hyper-V) will actually get offered some IE updates - because some IE components are still part of the OS. Iexplore.exe isn't there, but other chunks are there because substantial parts of the OS (and even third-party applications) use them.
[roughly] When a file is "deleted" on *nix its directory entry is removed, the inode link count is reduced by one and when the inode link count reaches zero the disk space is released for reusage. When a "file" is run, its inode link count is increased by one as there's a link to the open "incore" "copy". Thus you can unlink (delete) directory entries of ANY open file, not just a running program.
So to have more protection over temporary data in a program, open a file and then immediately unlink it - only programs that can manage to open it between(/at) its creation and unlinking from the directory structure will be able to access the data within it; this also leads to situations where the total space allocated on a disk [partition] (looking at, say df) can be much larger than is obviously apparent (using, say du) - this can happen if you have a large log file that is being written and you rm the directory entry for it: only when the program filling the log exits will the space be released.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell