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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."
That was what people were saying for ages. There is almost no way to remove mshtml (the real ie) from an up and running Windows OS.
It was possible, one Aussie teacher made a state of art .inf file and called it Win98 lite. It was even mentioned in court by judge. In fact, it could impress anyone since the speed of OS actually skyrocketed.
MS was unhappy of course and they built this massive IT conspiracy making sure it will never happen again and they would easily say ''Order us to remove? Well, see what happens when it is removed''. With lazy Windows developers and gecko.dll never stabilizing enough like todays Firefox or Apple Webkit, the plot worked fine.
If one installs Windows of any kind today, he should never pass any IE updates since it is there, working and massively linked even by Microsoft's most die-hard rivals.
If it would have been at least 1$ cheaper and/or actually available in stores, it would have been more successful.
At least in my country Romania, where all stores receive free advertising money, billboards, promotional content and get lower prices if they don't sell computers with Linux pre-installed, every store only advertises Home and Premium versions of operating systems. The N versions are never in stock and if you really want to order them, it takes probably two weeks for the store to receive it from the Microsoft importer in the capital of the country.
Well, anyways unless people buy it for a company computer, people get laptops or computers with FreeDOS preinstalled (as there's law in the country saying all pc's must have OS installed) and then they pirate the OS or use Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux.
It's one thing to impose Microsoft the need of offering that N version, if you don't impose them to advertise it in equal amount with the regular version and to actually manufacture the physical discs.
I would personally buy a Windows 7 version without IE but completely without it, not just having iexplore.exe removed.
I would then laugh when I see Yahoo Messenger no longer works, the help system in Windows no longer works, Visual Studio's help no longer works, all the junk internal websites using proprietary IE stuff at my old work place no longer working and so on and so forth.
disclaimer: i dont currently use ubuntu....but have used it in the past
i'm not sure why people think ubuntu is any more bloated than any other mainstream linux distro. They run the same software stack and if you listed the running processes when you reached the GUI you'd probably find most mainstream linux distros are much the same.
Most linux distros including ubuntu are built from the same standard components, and sometimes there are modifications made such as improvements to specific software and also corporate branding on images etc.
Such modifications are usually minor in comparison to the original software, and its doubtful that they add much to the memory footprint or speed of the OS as a whole...generally speaking.
Please identify the 'cruft' you refer to in ubuntu and I'll happily be proven wrong.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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
I didn't realize that had been changed recently. How sad. Another bit of Unix lore that only us old-timers will get to experience.
By their argument, `cd /; rm -rf .' still ought to work. Sigh. That lacks the drama, the feeling, the intensity of slamming down the return key knowing you're about to delete every file on the system. :-)
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.
Pathetic. But at least you get the source to rm(1) so you can fix that bug - or write your own, it's not that hard.
Now, get off my lawn.
Maybe MS should just improve the quality of its rendering engine.
Lo and behold, they did! IE8 passes ACID2. It's still behind all the other major browsers, but they're actually working on trying to catch up.
Remember that no major browser has a currently-shipping release version that passes ACID3; Safari 4 beta and Opera 10 alpha don't count quite yet. It's been argued that Firefox scores higher than IE, but the reality is that neither of them will pass any time soon. IE8 really doesn't look too bad in this light - it's a couple years behind the curve, but only a couple years.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
argh, don't joke about it, I actually managed to do a rm -rf / on a our live server, serving all our webads to clients, (I typed in /home/foo/bar / , which deleted the dir bar as well as most whole drive before I managed to stop it with cntr-c).
All this while explaining the care one must take when using rm -rf while logged in as root to a junior developer.
The system actually continued to run, as all neccessary programs were still in memory.
Basically noone where allowed to touch it in case it'd brake while I build a mirror of the server on a VPS, which we switched over to while rebuilding the real server.
THese were moments of agony
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
So many strawmen, so little time...
One, Ford does not have a monopoly, therefore they are not subject to the restrictions put on monopoly players.
Two, does it really make a difference to you if you have three or four render engines on your desktop? The space used is negliegable today. Different from the different GUI systems you list for comparison, you'd not notice very much anyways.
Three, the file-manager-monopoly is entirely misleading. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Leveraging it to drive out competition is.
Four, this is not a matter of quality. Even if IE were the absolut best browser around, it would still be the same problem, except maybe that MS wouldn't drag the matter out over years and do every legal and some illegal tricks on the book to avoid a judgement, because they actually could win in the market. Again, this is not a matter of quality, but of protecting the free market from one of its worst enemies: A monopoly player.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org