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Microsoft Drops Windows 7 E Editions
A week after Microsoft agreed to include a browser ballot screen in Windows 7 systems sold in Europe, then announced that those systems would initially include no browser at all — specifically, no Internet Explorer — Microsoft has changed its mind again and dropped talk of a European Windows 7 E edition. Here is the official Microsoft blog announcement, which includes a screen shot of the proposed ballot screen. The browsers are listed left-to-right in order of market share, with IE therefore having pride of place. PC Pro notes that, since the ballot screen would not appear if IE were not pre-installed, Microsoft's proposal opens the door for Google to work with PC manufacturers to get Chrome on new machines. Note that the browser ballot screen has not yet been accepted by the EU, though the initial reaction to it was welcoming.
Not only that but they can make web tools Live/Bing/Hotmail work best with their browser - influencing users of those tools to almost be forced to to use IE.
They've already been bitten by that one. They blocked all browsers except IE from accessing MSN.com. After two days of people making noise about it they let everyone view MSN again.
Did they learn? No. Less than two years later they served a stylesheet to Opera (and only to Opera, other browsers received a working stylesheet and IE had its own) that deliberately broke the display of the page. They served Opera the IE stylesheet, which displayed fine, after some more complaints.
Was that enough for them? No, they tried again with hotmail. They sent Opera an incomplete javascript file that was missing a required function to empty the junk e-mail. Other browsers were sent a different javascript file.
I don't think they'd dare try again with how closely the EU is monitoring them now.
In Vista/W7, typing a URL into Windows Explorer pops open your default browser.