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Windows 7 Kill Switch For IE Confirmed — For More Apps, Too
CWmike writes "Microsoft has confirmed that users will be able to remove its IE8 browser, as well as several other integrated applications, from Windows 7. Jack Mayo, a group program manager on the Windows team, listed in a blog post the applications that can be switched off. They include Internet Explorer 8, Fax and Scan, handwriting recognition, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Gadget Platform, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, and XPS Viewer and Services. He explained that the files associated with those applications and features are not actually deleted from the hard drive. The public beta of Windows 7 does not include the ability to 'kill' said apps. But a pirated copy of Windows 7 Build 7048 includes the new removal options, and has been leaked on the Internet." (We mentioned the reported ability to turn off IE8 yesterday as well.)
One of the articles mentions Windows Update, which requires IE's API's to work properly. I'm sure other cases would come up as well.
It also prevents them from being loaded, as the articles explain. If needed for API's that require them, or if you turn them back on, they're available, but otherwise don't get loaded.
I plan to buy a new LCD and I will choose something with DVI instead of HDMI just because DRM. As I don't have HDMI capable hardware I would like to kill DRM on my machine (don't watch TV so I don't have an HD TV either), If Win7 allow me that and after all the kids in their basements test the OS for hidden nasties and middle fingers from MS, I'll switch for Win7. I need 64bit addressable memory.
Besides some extra pins for audio, HDMI and DVI differ only in pinout. Electrically they're the same, and you can go from one to the other with just a simple converter. A monitor and computer with plain DVI can still use DRM if both support HDCP (and in the same light, HDMI can be transmitted unencrypted just like DVI is).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I switched to Gentoo a couple years ago, but I'm pretty sure when I was using Ubuntu I could remove just about anything.
It blows my mind that they could be so entrenched that just removing them, or not having them installed to begin with, isn't trivial.
Software engineering 101: what part of the word "dependency" blows your mind? What platform lets you snap out the provided rich text rendering engine for something else? Practically every application on the platform uses it in some way! And why do you trust Joe Sixpack to do this? What will he do when it renders things oh-so-slightly differently? He won't put together that it is because he changed out the HTML renderer.
Everyone here continues to bellyache about things without offering up solutions that actually work outside of their parents basement. This is not a new problem, dependency management sucks, and will always suck because third party apps are built to certain implementations of things and become reliant on undocumented behavior without even realizing it.
The rendering engine for IE is used other places in Windows (like the help system IIRC). The same goes for others like WMP. The libraries are needed for other applications and the executable is so small in comparison that removing it rather than just disabling it makes some sense.
From the article:
Best of both worlds in my opinion. I also like that there is one unified interface for managing features. This is just one example, but in vista you could use 'add/remove components' for IIS, but if you wanted to disable Media Center, you had to do it from the group policy editor. Extremely frustrating.
I plan to buy a new LCD and I will choose something with DVI instead of HDMI just because DRM.
Do you know what you are talking about?
The DRM is HDCP, not HDMI. DVI is compatible with HDCP, and most new DVI panels support HDCP over DVI.
If you go out of your way to find one that doesn't, you are just being a twit. Not having HDCP support just means you can't play HDCP content; it doesn't strip HDCP protection from a signal or anything like that.
If you don't play and don't intend to ever play HDCP content, then it doesn't matter in the least whether or not your panel supports it or not, because its not going to affect you in the slightest. Having HDCP support doesn't automatically encrypt not HDCP content.
I'm curious what monitors are currently on your short list of possible buys?
The only monitors at newegg that I can find that don't support HDCP are the lowest end consumer junk TN panels that only have 1 VGA input. And no digital inputs at all.
The year of ubuntu on the designer workstation?? *ubuntu 9.04 beta 4 64bit It's pretty pretty fast and stable.
Your going to look pretty silling sitting there with your no-name brand 17" VGA monitor with a cheap 6-bit TN panel trying to convince people you are a "professional graphics designer".
Full-blown apps are relatively easy to remove, but some of the "desktop environment" stuff - applets, the various managers (volumes, power), libraries - sit at the centre of a web of dependencies and aren't easy to get rid of. Even things that are only "Recommends:"-ed seem to pop back sometimes when I'm not looking :/
Having said that, disk is insanely cheap these days, so that even I, who's pretty obsessive about avoiding 'bloat', have learnt to live with leaving the packages around. Memory's pretty cheap too, and anyway actually stopping unnecessary components from running is a bit easier.
And, of course, no one distro / desktop environment "fits all." Xubuntu is lighter and more "loosely coupled", and there are other Ubuntu variants that are even more hardcore (I keep meaning to give #! a spin ..) That's really where free software trumps commercial: each subculture that feels the need can roll its own.
These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD.
and
A second decision is that we also continue to support the APIs available for features where these APIs are necessary to the functionality of Windows or where there are APIs that are used by developers that can be viewed as independent of the component. As many of you know these are often referred to as âoedependenciesâ and with Windows the dependencies can run both internal to Windows and external for ISVs.
I don't see why not.
Remember XP, where you could "remove" IE in the "add/remove Windows components" menu? Then you click "My computer" and type in a web address in the address bar and BAM! It's launched in IE!
switched off" != uninstalled.
To the vast majority of Windows users, most or all of the terms I've emphasized above don't apply. To them, proposing a second web browser would elicit a reply like "Why would I need Firefox? I've already got the Internet on my computer!" or similarly, "OpenOffice? I can already open Office. Why would I need to open it through that other picture?" or "I can get geckos and tridents on my MySpace from the picture thingy, but what's a webkit?"...
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You stated it yourself, things (and by things I mean built-in windows apps) are built on undocumented behavior making it almost impossible to replicate.
The dependency on a specific library isn't the problem here, its the dependency on apps/libraries that are developed with way too much intimate knowledge of the OS.
If you use Firefox, you can probably use the IETab extension to load specific web sites using Internet Explorer's rendering engine (which will NOT be removed when you disable IE), integrated with Firefox's tab management. You can maintain a list of sites that should be loaded with IE's engine, so it's automatic and you don't have to switch browsers.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What "garbage apps" did you want to uninstall?
Ubuntu has a pretty clean installation, there's not much in there - short of maybe a few games that don't take up much space - that any user won't want.
Care to name some? Or are you just trolling?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
That only takes care of one of a bunch of applications. Sometimes its just easier to have everything all the same way as opposed to having one being treated differently then the others. Please keep in mind, more than just IE is being discussed here.
Internet Explorer is a web browser. Trident is the layout engine. Other programs can make use of Trident to, in effect, allow for web browsing. Microsoft can use Trident in places other than IE where it makes sense to have a layout engine. Removing IE will not remove Trident.
It's really not that hard, people.
Given that the user might still expect all that other stuff to work after "removing" IE, what are you really removing? A windowed presentation with some bookmark functionality?
Well, yes, that, and an address bar. That's also what most people call a "browser". The thing that renders the pages is "rendering engine". IE is the browser, MSHTML/Trident is the rendering engine.
Perhaps someone else can comment on how close Windows is to allowing some other browser vendor to be a plug-in replacement for all that other functionality.
MSHTML is embeddable into applications as an ActiveX control. ActiveX is COM-based, and COM is all about programming against interfaces. In case of MSHTML, that's the IWebBrowser2 interface, and everything that it references. Due to the nature of COM, it is, of course, entirely possible to provide your own implementation of all of these. At some point, the application also has to instantiate a specific COM component implementing that interface - that's identified by a GUID in the registry. Again, it is quite possible to rewrite that registry key so that it points to your implementations instead of MSHTML.
Of course, this is still a very non-trivial task, because there are many subtleties. Applications that host MSHTML can rely on many of its features (custom HTML elements and CSS properties, VML, JavaScript extensions or VBScript, ability to host .NET and ActiveX controls, etc). Those are all documented, but the sheer amount of things that must be handled is staggering.
So that they can be re-installed without requiring the re-insertion of the DVD.
If they're using the same functionality as "Windows Features" in Vista, then when the feature is disabled, it's uninstalled and it cannot be executed. Imagine having the Windows ISO copied to the HDD and not having it mounted. If you want to install a component (like IIS), you don't go digging for the install disk - just check a checkbox and wait 10+ minutes.
And when it's uninstalled, the files remain on the HDD in the ISO equivalent, but do not remain in the 'accessible' folder structure, and are therefore no executable.
I'd expect that you'd be hard pressed to find iExplore.exe after unchecking the "IE8" checkbox in Win7.
It does remove them, but it doesn't nuke them from the installation image. Basically, (bear in mind that "disk is cheap") when you install Windows Vista or later, it dumps a copy of the installation media on your hard drive so that you don't need the DVD to install or remove stuff. When you remove a component, the installed version is deleted and the copy of it in the image is left alone so that you can easily put it back. Think of it as apt-get with a local repository if it helps any. I can't speak for whether it keeps the install image security-updated though - that I don't know.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Actually, it's a violation of the HDMI specification to not implement HDCP.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".