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Microsoft Busting Its Own Browser+OS Myth
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.'"
What does this prove? Different versions of IE's can obviously provide the system and application wide libraries too, but there has to be at least one of them installed for it to work.
Then there is also the fact that countless amount of software uses IE's rendering engine, which has to be present in the system for those to work. Which again works with different versions of it.
I'm happy Steam changed to it's own WebKit, but it was just a few months ago and there still are thousands of other software that uses it.
And nobody believes it now.
A possible alternative headline could be "Obvious lie from MS turns out to be a lie"
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.....
'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.'"
Fallacious logic!
Internet Explorer is part of Windows and not Internet Explorer 6 is part of Windows.
Customers are just plain lazy or the IT departments just don't care if its IE6 or IE9 on 3 year old systems they just attend to when it's broken down.
I think the whole post is not worth news for a nerd. There is no logic to this argument and should be trashed.
Were does one draw the line between OS and application (and let's not draw libraries into this).
The operating system manages the hardware, and provides an interface between the hardware and applications. Everything else is an application (including most libraries, since they're just reusable parts of applications).
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 next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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
Um, when Microsoft made that claim, they were referring to Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 which are both almost 9 years old. At that time, IE6 was very likely tightly linked to the OS. They slowly "unlinked" it over the years which I'm sure was a lot of work. You can argue that they shouldn't have linked it in the first place (you may or may not be right). The fact that you could upgrade from IE6 to IE7 or 8 does not mean it was not linked - can you not upgrade certain pieces of the OS on Linux, Unix, or MacOS in small pieces? Isn't that what a patch is?
We are now to MAJOR OS versions later and Microsoft doesn't claim the OS and the browser are linked anymore.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Microsoft released a version of Windows without IE, and it was unstable, erratic, and unreliable.
IOW, indistinguishable from the regular version.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And their argument didn't even work at the time. Their own video tapes showed that it worked fine without IE. It was pretty hilarious, actually.
Furthermore I don't think the author's argument makes any sense; she is not a programmer, she is an author and analyst. Any programmer will know that even if the browser were an integral part of the OS, it could still be replaced as long as those parts that are used by the OS remain (which can obviously happen when you upgrade your own browser).
She also tries to claim that Microsoft is trying to be consistent in its arguments, but Microsoft (like any competent spin-doctor) doesn't care if their arguments are consistent, they only care if they convince at the moment. Unlike geeks they feel no need to be consistent with arguments from 10 years ago that no one remembers.
Qxe4
More to the point, the Justice Dept pulled the experienced lawyers off the case once the Bush Administration took over in 2001.
One suspects it was for ideological reasons, Republicans being known for favoring big business.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It's almost like there's some kind of Application Programming Interface layer there. Wouldn't that be new and interesting?
New and interesting, you say? You should apply for a patent!
Exactly. As a greybeard old enough to have used 98Lite to "hot rod" systems I can say that even back then you could remove it easy enough, but without MSHTML.dll and related files on the system many programs that were not made by MSFT simply wouldn't run or would die hard. In the days of dialup it was simply better to have a rendering engine built into the OS because as anyone on the dialup back then would tell you, even small downloads were slooooow buddy.
I frankly never understood why so much focus was on IE during the trail, when IMHO there were much better smoking guns, such as tying OEM licenses to PCs sold, not copies of Windows sold. That little trick effectively killed BeOS and made sure the only thing you were getting from an OEM was Windows. Now that they can no longer do that trick (and I personally hope Intel gets busted for their OEMs backroom dealing) frankly I think MSFT should be able to put whatever programs they want into their OS. After all it isn't like you have to buy Windows, there is OSX, Linux, BSD, etc, and plenty of places like System76 that will be happy to sell non-MSFT equipment to you, just as there is FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Kmeleon, Flock, etc.
I'm just glad the days of "This site requires IE" are dying hard IE6 can't die fast enough IMHO. The only nice thing I can say about IE is it makes switching people to FF that much easier. Just an hour ago I finished up a service call to the nice retired NASA engineer down the hall. After using IE since Win95 I switched him over to FF. After seeing how easy it was to block ads and add specialized searches he was sold. BTW does anyone know of any good "deep web" search engines I can point him towards? He is doing geology research and needs to get more "off the beaten path" to find the kind of data he requires for the paper he's working on. I'm afraid geology and deep web isn't something I have experience in, so any pointers would be helpful.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A web browser needs an internet-connection library, a display library, and a parser library for the data between them.
If you put that into your OS, other application developers may suddenly decide they want to use the internet library and some of the parser library, instead of whatever libraries the OS used to have, or whatever code they were planning to implement themselves.
Now someone says "we order you to remove the web browser from the OS."
You say "that is impossible. Parts of the web browser now serve as parts of the OS."
The only thing you can remove is the browser executable itself, which in the extreme case is just a call with particular arguments to a function in a library you can't remove. So you remove the browser executable and convince the issuers of the order that you have done their bidding.
The operating system manages the hardware, and provides an interface between the hardware and applications. Everything else is an application (including most libraries, since they're just reusable parts of applications).
br/?
That's the definition of a microkernel. But that is irrelevant in a discussion about Windows, which is a monolithic kernel and does other things like incorporating a TCP/IP stack, file systems, virtual memory, etc -- none of which fit your definition of what an OS should do. So the GP's point is well taken - there is no single agreed-upon definition of what should be in the operating system, and what should be left to user-space; different operating systems do it differently.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'm afraid geology and deep web isn't something I have experience in, so any pointers would be helpful.
0x3859FA23 0xDE29018E 0xB538DD86 0x76A1FFFF
You're welcome.
They're not dying; they just moved. Quite a number of mobile sites do the same thing with Safari instead of IE, and Apple pushes its proprietary -webkit things as hard as MS ever did theirs (see the recent fiasco when MS felt like it had to implement -webkit-text-size-adjust, which is otherwise only implemented in Mobile Safari and apparently widely used to make web pages which will only render correctly in Mobile Safari, in its mobile browser...)
Different big company, slightly different technologies, same old tactics.
The web would have resulted in the loss of MS profit if it had been allowed to grow freely. At that time many production machines were still using very simple systems that could be implemented on web based interface. Companies like Compaq were still competing hard and had non-MS offering that were less complex and more reliable than the PC. MS Office was not quite everywhere, and options existed. The fight was going over who controlled the application front end. If the application front end was platform independent, then people could run software on MS servers, but the desktop could be anything for the average worker drone.
This could not happen. So MS made IE into a application front end that would only run on windows. This meant that the servers and desktop had to run MS software. OEM could not develop intelligent terminals that would have saved huge amounts of administrative costs. OEM could not sell this intelligent terminal for the same price as a MS PC and pocket the profit.
In reality what happened, the lie that MS could make people believe, no matter who much they said it, is that there is a real benefit to having the server run the same software as the desktop. So people continued to use MS desktops, but many switched to linux servers. This meant the bombs that MS put in IE to connect it to MS Windows became a liability. They tried to stop *nix with ad campiagns, in the courts, but with IE 8, even if the propaganda continues, the effect is clear.
Which is also why there is so much activities over phones and tablets. The OEM is nevery going to make a fair profit with MS, neither are developers. That is why most of the cool stuff have been developed in places outside of the US. Google is sharing profits, and, no matter what any says, so is Apple. The App store has made it possible to make money. MS is now where Unix was in the 80's. An expensive albeit still relevant dinosaur. It is a matter of time until people look on our old desktop like we looked at IBM 360 of VAX. A little nostalgic, but happy we have something bette.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
No, Linux is an OS. GNU is a set of tools that run on it.
I'm curious to know if anyone has tried IE7 or IE8 on an older computer running XP that has less than 256MB RAM? Such PCs (barely) meet the requirements for XP, and since IE is "inextricably part of the OS", Microsoft is IMHO on the hook to come up with a solution for such users...
For example, I have an old Toshiba Libretto 110CT. The specs: Pentium-MMX, 233MHz, 64MB RAM, 160GB PATA HD (I upgraded for the better access rate, since it only supports PIO mode), 802.11b WiFi... Going above 64MB RAM is not an option (excluding one hack that requires soldering and could bring it up to a massive 96MB). It's a neat little toy, especially for DOS games, and works reasonably well with XP Pro, Office XP, WordPerfect 11, etc.--especially after I disable 7 unnecessary services. Firefox 3.6 is painful on it, but it runs better than earlier versions of Firefox due to improvements in Javascript. IE6 runs reasonably well--better than Firefox. So, I'm curious--is IE7 or IE8 worth a try on this thing?
I know IE7 sucks with Javascript, so should I just go to IE8? Has anyone even tried IE7/8 on a very low end PC that barely meets XP & IE specs? Even IE8 says it needs only 64MB RAM. (I still need access to Windows Update and the occasional website...)
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Patent number: 5794230
Page 12
Method and system for creating and searching directories on a server
Who cares if Microsoft lies, they don't know what they are doing, anyway. Their long term vision lacks anyway. Apple has a store MW wants a store. Apple has an App store, Microsoft wants an App store, Apple has Ipod, Microsoft wants an Ipod. Etc. They want to be the best, but each time they just give up. If Microsoft ever had the edge of vision, they have lost in anyways. They are already have become the boring IBM Gates never wanted to be. And Gates is gone. There is no leadership, there is no focus. They just want to do everything, and they do everything.... Poorly
That must be why Windows is still ~90% of the market, with a similar share for Office.
Which kind are you?
http://www.leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-of-libertarian/
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Microsoft illegally leveraged their monopoly at the time. Including a competitive browser for "Free" with Windows was the downfall for Netscape. The browser did have a cost but it was blended in with the cost of Windows which almost everyone run. Netscape could no longer sell their browser and the rest is history. The browser was never a part of the operating system and really never needed to be. It just was Microsofts way of protecting its monopoly. I think what most people miss is that Microsoft never wanted web browser technology to exist! They only produced IE in order to kill off Netscape. They had that idea that only specific windows desktop applications would provide some access to the internet in a very controlled way, not like browsing or surfing the web for whatever content you would like. Development for IE almost came to complete halt if it wasnt for open source browsers coming of age.
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
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.
But my roommate, at the time, did Windows installations on grey boxes full-time. He discovered that if you used the IE3 uninstaller, IE4 would uninstall just fine, leaving a completely usable system (as far as Win95 was concerned). This means that Microsoft added something to the IE4 uninstaller to willfully break machines that uninstalled iE4.
The creation of an IE-free version for the European market also underlies their claims.
Nonetheless, it does remain a legally perilous path for Microsoft to expressly admit that IE really isn't tied to the operating system.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Actually on a current system the first 4 hex chars of a 64-bit pointer have to be 0s (or Fs in system space). The current generation of cpus only support 48-bits of actual address.