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.'"

Comments

Re:Why should they care now?

[sopssa]

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.

Nobody believed it at the time

[91degrees]

And nobody believes it now.

A possible alternative headline could be "Obvious lie from MS turns out to be a lie"

Re:Nobody believed it at the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, few people care or listened at the time. Anybody who is still using IE6 does not give a rat's ass what MS has claimed about the ties between IE and the OS. Very few civilians paid attention to the details of the anti-trust case, and they are not convinced that they cannot upgrade their browser because of something MS lawyers claimed in a court room a decade ago.

Re:Nobody believed it at the time

[Bai jie]

I've posted instructions on how to remove lynx. Its in jpeg format.

Re:Nobody believed it at the time

[Blakey Rat]

It was true when they said it, about Windows 98. Windows 98 couldn't (for all practical purposes) be run without IE-- even drawing the desktop depended on it. Moreover, there would have been no way for MS to remove the IE integration within the ridiculous time frame the court was asking about. (90 days, if I recall correctly.)

Here's a secret, one the article writer didn't tell you, that I'm about to reveal. You may want to sit down for this... ready? Ok, here goes:

THINGS CHANGE OVER TIME

Shocking, I know.

The reason IE isn't integrated into Windows anymore is because every version of Windows, from XP to 7, has been working to remove the integration that was previously present.

And you know what? IE aside, a HTML renderer of some sort *is* required by Windows-- just as it's required by OS X, most Linux distributions, and Chrome OS. So if you take IE to mean "iexplore.exe", then no it's no longer required. If you take it to mean "the Trident HTML rendering component", then yes it is required-- exactly as required as WebKit is in OS X.

Re:Nobody believed it at the time

[shaitand]

"It was true when they said it, about Windows 98. Windows 98 couldn't (for all practical purposes) be run without IE-- even drawing the desktop depended on it."

That argument would be more convincing if Windows 98 hadn't been made that way for the purpose of making the argument in the first place.

Um no...

[Dynedain]

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).

Re:Um no...

[StormReaver]

IE is not inextricably bound to the OS because MS has intentionally been keeping it split.

Which is the very thing that Microsoft told the court was not possible. So...ummm....yes, Microsoft lied.

Re:Um no...

[CannonballHead]

Did they tell the court that the browser is inextricably bound to the CURRENT OS or to future OS's?

Re:Um no...

[xavierpayne]

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.

Re:Um no...

[nine-times]

I don't think that anyone disbelieved Microsoft when they claimed that IE had been made part of the OS. No one is really calling that a myth. The supposed myth is that it had to be part of the OS, and that Microsoft could not make a meaningful distinction between the browser and the OS.

Still, we can argue about whether Microsoft claimed such a thing or whether it really is a "myth".

Re:Um no...

[commodore64_love]

Good question.

At the time Microsoft was defending Windows 98, claiming their browser was integrated with it (which was true). Of course that OS was retired in 2001 (me was the last version). We now use a completely different OS called Windows NT 5.x (XP) or 6.x (Vista/Seven) so the old argument that IE is integrated no longer applies.

Re:When is a line not a line?

[StormReaver]

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).

Re:Doesn't Matter

[ptomblin]

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.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[dkleinsc]

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.

That claim is almost 9 years old...

[in10se]

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.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[Nimey]

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.

Re:Why should they care now?

[Dragonslicer]

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!

Re:Why should they care now?

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:When is a line not a line?

[blair1q]

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.

Re:Why should they care now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IE not connected, but limited

[fermion]

Here is my take. MS makes a profit by controlling the computer market. They mark up products in such a way, and provide strategic discounts, so most of the profits in the desktop computer industry goes to them. This is why Dell has a gross profit of around 10% and MS has a gross profit of 80%. Apple, who manufacturers computer but does not pay the MS tax has a gross profit of around 40%. Obviously any computer manufacturer would want to have a gross profit more in line with Apple. MS would hate that because assuming the price of the computer is fixed, and profit to the OEM will cut into the MS profit. In this screwed up market, it is a zero sum game, which is the death of any free market.

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.