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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."
A compelling feature to drag people away from XP.
Now only if it included a utility to uninstall Windows...
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Man who remove Internet Explorer but not Windows is a little like Lance Armstrong: still one Ballmer remaining.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
And who has money on the OS not working right afterwards?
Seriously? That's absolute crap. Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled. The EU needs to get its head out of its a**. If I want IE disabled, I'll disable it.
...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.
I have: "sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1"
Actually, the IE feature set isn't as pervasive as it used to be. For example Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser) used to treat folders as a kind of web page. If you wanted to customize a folder, you editing its style sheets and added VBS scripts. Lots of nice exploits there, which is why it no longer works.
On the other hand, I sometimes get an IE security warning when I right click on network files served by Samba. It appears that IE plays a role in displaying context menus!
Still, if the user can't use IE to surf the web, IE doesn't exist, at least from the user's point of view. The fact that IE components are still employed by the OS is beside the point. The point being that IE no longer has precedence over other web browsers.
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.
Why remove the core libraries? We develop several applications which rely on it, and users will blame us if app doesn't work out of the box. FWIW, I don't care what browser comes with Windows as long as it comes with one.
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.
It seems the astroturfers are going crazy trying to confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with end users. The important thing the EU is trying to get is for OEM's to have the ability to replace IE with (or add to IE) Firefox or some other browser.
Let's repeat this carefully:
1. An OEM (like Dell) must be able to load the computer with arbitrary programs, some of which compete with Microsoft's world domination plans, without Microsoft being able to punish them by changing the terms of their OEM contract.
2. This has NOTHING to do with what users do with their machine after they get it home. Astroturfers are trying to say this has something to do with installing alternative browsers, or some kind of installation switch to allow the users to choose, or other bullshit. That is just to make it sound like the EU is forcing the machines to be "hard to use". In fact it is making the machine easier to use because it allows end users to not have to do the "hard" installation step, this difficulty is in fact a major part of Microsoft's lock-in.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
4. It does sound like the truth is that IE is somewhat more "integrated" than just the existence of libraries, and thus Microsoft had to do some work so that everything works if the ie.exe file is missing (such as apparently removing the ability to choose it as the default browser if it is missing). Good for them, they are obeying the rules.
How do you uninstall a program and all the dependencies it installs in Linux?
Not being an ass - i'm just genuinely curious. I've never found a way easier than windows.
apt-get purge program
apt-get autoremove
That should work for apt-based distros.
Got any examples?
Follow me
and the application data folder?
what about the localstore?
did it place any files in %windir% or %sysdir%?
did it make any file extension associations?
did it add any environment variables?
etc.
crap cleaner won't clean -all- of that up.
That said, the original poster's comment was bunk; an uninstallation isonly as good as the uninstall routine. If it doesn't delete -all- files / remove -all- registry entries, etc. set upon install, then that's an issue with the uninstaller, not with the host OS.
I'm sure that some of the -package managers- do a great job at tracking this (though they're likely to miss run-time file/store changes just as well), but that says far more about the package manager than it does about the host OS.
Your best bet is going to be to take a snapshot of your system, install, run for a while, do a diff, remove known variables from other use (from earlier diffs, presumably) - i.e. e-mail database, temporary files, etc. - store that and use that to remove files/registry settings/etc. later on.
Not quite; a number of apps put stuff outside of the .app wrapper directory. Anything that loads a kernel extension (vmware, for example), as well as other application that put frameworks in /Library and /System/Library. And then there's prefs and cache files left over in your own Library directory.
Still, it's significantly better than it is on windows.
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.
I normally use Firefox, but there are still a lot of web sites out there with JavaScript that only works properly under IE, so I keep IE handy to access those sites. I don't uninstall Safari just 'cause I use Firefox on my Mac, why should I uninstall IE just 'cause I use Firefox on my PC?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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/
Maybe I shouldn't rely on any sort of Library? Bundle my own browser, GUI toolkit, Shell? audio/video codecs? Hell, how about my own HAL?
Do you know a how long it takes to get permission to use or even link users to download a piece of software? So many potential liability issues that a multibillion dollar product has to deal with?
Idealist heaven for you as it might be, it's pure hell for the developers.
The problem is that even if you did that, certain programs would still launch IE (Autodesk's feedback utitlity for software crashes for example) instead of the default system browseer.
IE != Gecko. Gecko is used to render help files and other system-wide things that need an HTML rendering engine (same think as WebKit on OSX), but that does not mean that the IE application needs to be present to do so.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Safari comes with OSX.
Please come back with an educated opinion once you know what MS's crime is. There is no law against bundling a Web browser with an OS. There is a law against undermining a market by tying a monopolized market with an un-monopolized market.
This is a big stink about nothing.
How would you know? You admit you don't understand what MS is doing that is illegal. So how would you know they aren't guilty or that the law is not a just and important one?
They just need to create a new hh.exe executable (or whatever is used to open those help files in the background) and list it as important update for a specific application (Office, whatever) in Windows Updates.
The updated help application can very well use a custom made DLL file or several DLL files or internal code to render the contents of the help file. A simple library capable of showing text, links and jpg/gif images on a window is not that hard to do.
As long as these DLL files are only used by this help application I don't care.
It's not our fault that Microsoft intentionally did the help system and other Windows systems around IE to lock users into it. Users shouldn't suffer because of it.
Maybe you're too young but in WIndows 95, there was already a help system implemented (with HLP files, not the CHM files) that allowed people to go between help pages easily but didn't use IE.
many of my games just won't work properly.
Can you give us some samples? This just doesn't seem right, considering I've been able to run the everything from the OpenGL version of Quake 1 to some obscure TI 99/4a emulators.
Explorer not only crashes at least once a day
Try ShellExView. It will allow you to see what 3rd party extensions might be hooked to explorer, which is a classic cause of explorer related stability problems.
C:\Users\Public. Brilliant.
This was introduced with Vista.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
(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 /'.
Depends on the application/installer... but you should also check:
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\*
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Application Data\*
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Application Data\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Temp\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\SendTo\* (Hidden)
?:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Templates\* (Hidden)
Sometimes:
?:\Documents and Settings\All Users\
As well as:
?:\Program Files\Common Files\*
?:\Program Files\InstallShield Installation Information\* (Hidden)
?:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Installations\*
?:\WINDOWS\Inf\* (Hidden)
?:\WINDOWS\Installer\* (Hidden)
?:\WINDOWS\System32\*
?:\WINDOWS\Temp\*
?:\WINDOWS\dllcache\* (Hidden)
?:\WINDOWS\Drivers\*
And the registry:
HKCR\Software\%Document Types%
HKCU\Software\CLSD\*
HKCU\Software\%App/DevName%
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder\*
HKLM\Software\%App/DevName%
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder\*
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\*
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SharedDlls\*
And quite a few others, I generally just search for DeveloperName, delete (most) matches, then search for ApplicationName, delete matches, ExecutableName, delete matches...
How about when IE crashes it DOESN'T take down file explorer with it? That is my single biggest non -security gripe with IE and the most obvious noticeable flaw in this embed-ie-in-everything approach
Does anyone think there are practical reasons for wanting this?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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.
the rendering engine sticks around because it's used elsewhere in the operating system for other tasks
Meaning, of course, it's still there to be exploited by anything that exploits IE rendering bugs.
Yes, just like bugs in OpenSSL can be exploited if you have applications that load that library, even after other applications that use that library have been uninstalled. Of course, security patches will be released to fix those bugs, which is why it's important to stay up to date.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
So the same code that should be removed should be moved instead. OK, I can grok that.
I'm quite a bit older than '95, having cut teeth on Windows 2.x (Excel). I much preferred DOS, as did most of the sane.
But .HLP had its own set of issues, primarily around authoring and maintenance, and the indexing sucked. And under the hood it was basically a case of supporting a bastardised HTML anywhere. I think I prefer having 1 language, and one codebase.
Also it occurred to me after I posted that if you ensure Windows has no method of interpreting HTML out of the box, then you will assuredly end up with tens or hundreds of different HTML engines. Each must be updated, patched and managed. I don't believe this is a reasonable approach. HTML is common enough that I believe it should be a basic part of a client OS.
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.
They've also stifled text editor innovation by bundling notepad.exe. They haven't even had the good graces to update it since the NT version. A classic example of MS sitting on its laurels.
Errr... Trident that is. Gecko is Mozilla's rendering engine. Too many hours staring at CSS today....
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
there is, however, a certain monopolized desktop market that MS is using to expose their browser to everyone
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Apaches are kick ass Indians or equally kick ass combat helicopters.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;