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Microsoft Busting Its Own Browser+OS Myth

Posted by timothy on from the in-sepa-rable dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley used her Redmond magazine column this month to point out that after years of arguing that the browser is 'inextricably linked' to the operating system, the company's current push to get users to drop IE 6 for newer versions, plus IE's separate release schedule, are disproving its own argument. From the article: 'Microsoft has insisted that its browser is part of Windows, and, ironically, that's coming back to haunt the company. Customers can mix and match different versions of IE with different versions of Windows. ... But Microsoft has done very little to get this message out there. I'd argue this is because it makes plain the absurdity of the company's claims that IE is part of Windows.'"

13 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Um no... by Dynedain · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not a myth. After that valid argument was deemed insufficient to get out of the anti-trust lawsuits, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to detach IE from the OS.

    For example, since IE7, attempts at FTP gets shunted to Windows Explorer. Windows Update on Vista and Windows 7 no longer use IE. The help system uses Trident, but not IExplore.exe. Windows in the EU now prompts the user for which browser to install.

    IE is not inextricably bound to the OS because MS has intentionally been keeping it split. However, just because you can get IE removed/disabled, doesn't mean you can remove the HTML rendering engine (Trident). Just like stripping Safari out of OSX, doesn't completely remove WebKit (used in iTunes and a lot of other things).

    --
    I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    1. Re:Um no... by xavierpayne · · Score: 5, Informative

      Microsoft told the court it was not possible in the retarded 30-90 timeframe the court demanded. It's taken years and at least 1 whole new OS cycle to get the level of detachment they have now.

    2. Re:Um no... by Your.Master · · Score: 2, Informative

      Those are the Windows LAN settings. IE uses them, as does Chrome and many other well-behaved Windows applications.

      IE also provides an access point to them mixed in with IE-specific settings, which causes some confusion. You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.

    3. Re:Um no... by linebackn · · Score: 2, Informative

      If it is a myth or not depends on how you look at it. Back in the day I was able to run Windows 98 (98Lite) without any trace of IE and at the same time run IE 4 under Wine without Windows.

      But the catch was IE is heavily made up of components that other applications could make use of (and too often did regardless if it made sense or not). In fact, the entire Windows 98 "integrated" shell depended on many of these components and would fail to run if IE was removed in its entirety. (In that case the Windows 95 shell had to be used instead). Since the OS bundle was therefore unusable to normal users without the IE application, they called it "integrated with the OS".

      These components still exist and are unfortunately heavily depended on by Windows and numerous applications.

      The worst part about this is that Microsoft has painted themselves in to a corner because of the way it is implemented. It is not possible to cleanly remove IE in its entirety (well, *I* think this should be possible) or run multiple versions of IE in any officially supported manner under the same instance of Windows.

      If I needed to access a webby app that only worked in Netscape 4, I probably could install Netscape 4 under Windows 7 and access it just fine in conjunction with any other newer browsers. No such luck with IE, those that need to use IE 6 HAVE to use Windows XP only and can not even install IE 8 at the same time. (Yes, there are some hacks out there but the only official way Microsoft supports running IE 6 under Vista/7 is using XP in VM!)

  2. Re:Nobody believed it at the time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Came here to say this.

    There have always been third-party tools to remove IE from Windows.
     

  3. Re:Doesn't Matter by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Informative

    It wasn't court system incompetence that caused Microsoft to get away with its antitrust practices. Far from it - they had gotten to the point of starting to decide sanctions.

    The thing was, shortly after the 2000 election cycle, the Justice Department decided to stop pursuing the court case, for some reason, and settled for a slap on the wrist.

    --
    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  4. Re:Doesn't Matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Funny thing is, I have a quote from a Microsoft patent application that occurred around the same time they were arguing in court that the browser was part of the OS: "It should be understood by those skilled in the art that a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, ... is separate from the operating system." Man, I wish I'd recorded the patent application number when I put that in my quotes file.

    The US Patent Number is 5,794,230.

  5. Re:When is a line not a line? by XanC · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, Linux is an OS. GNU is a set of tools that run on it.

  6. Re:Doesn't Matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Patent number: 5794230
    Page 12
    Method and system for creating and searching directories on a server

  7. Re:Why should they care now? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know about all that. I've been using Nlited versions of Windows for quite a long while now. IE is ripped out by the roots, before the installation media is burnt. No IE at all. It works well on XP and Windows7. Had I ever bothered with Vista, I'm certain it would have worked there as well. (Vista was just to big a POS to ever bother Nliting) Sure, a lot of software may look for that rendering engine, but in my experience, for home use, the software that I use works just fine if the only rendering engine available is Gecko. Hell, I can read Windows CHM files on Linux, and there isn't the vaguest trace of Trident on those machines.

    Everything that was ever said about Trident being necessary for the operating system to work was a lie. Simple as that.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  8. Re:Windows / IE by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Informative

    You could still access "Internet Explorer" by typing a URL into any Windows Explorer address bar. And that level of integration is what pretty much means that IE is tied into the OS.

    This level of integration is very much present in Windows 7.

    That's not true, actually. In 7 (and Vista), Explorer doesn't embed IE. If you type an HTTP URL in the address bar, it will open it in your default system browser, which may or may not be IE. If you uninstall IE (e.g. in EU edition), and won't install any other browser, you won't be able to open HTTP URLs from Explorer at all.

    To be more precise, Explorer just hands the entered URL over to ShellExecute API function, which does its magic of looking up the associated default application and launching it. This is actually what any well-behaved application should do with URLs on Windows.

  9. Re:Nobody believed it at the time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    nope, they are man pages (raw text gziped)

  10. Re:Nobody believed it at the time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Bullshit. 98lite could and quite happily did remove IE from Windows 98, and it worked fine. Drawing the desktop did not depend on it at all.