Antitrust Case Over, Microsoft Ties IE 10 To Win 8

deadeyefred writes "With the last vestiges of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust consent decree expiring earlier this year, the company is again tying its browser tightly to Windows. In pre-release versions of IE 10 and Windows 8, IE 10 cannot be uninstalled and is required to enable the new 'Metro'-style apps."

Comments

No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

IE's market share isn't what it used to be. Neither is Window's market share for that matter.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Fluffeh]

I can see this as one of two things - either Microsoft is trying to bump it's browser market share or they are cutting corners in their code to have Windows depending on bits of IE10 to give the core OS functionality.

If this is an attempt at market share, I think it is rather doomed to fail. Gone are the days where people just accepted whatever browser comes with their OS. Even the very non-technical business people that I work with mostly install their browser of choice.

If this is cost cutting and an attempt to re-use code from one thing in another, then I think it will likely just be ignored by many users who don't care as much - but alienate the nerds even more. The types that frequent /. for example, are more and more likely to find reasons for pushing them into no longer using windows (for the ones who still use it that is) and thus putting even more leaks into the ship.

My mother for example uses the computer VERY little and doesn't do much with it. When it is time to upgrade (which is fast approaching) I am seriously considering ninja-installing a distro onto her machine and simply saying "This is the new computer, things are a little different" rather than going through the same thing while installing the latest and greatest from Microsoft. For her, there isn't any difference in finding all the buttons going from XP to Win 7 or Win 8. I may as well get her onto another OS totally.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, code reuse is bad now? Please explain.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, the rest of his comment sounded good, but the code re-use thing doesn't quite make sense. Code re-use is usually a good thing, and rather irrelevant to this case; I think he meant something different, perhaps that tying the browser inseparably to the OS saves MS money in some way over making it more modular. However, modularity is usually a big advantage in the long run because it makes it easier to separate problems, or replace whole components with better components, without the whole house of cards falling down.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[the linux geek]

I'm assuming Windows depends on IE. The new Metro stuff is largely HTML/Javascript, and it would make sense if it ran on the IE rendering engine.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Fluffeh]

Code re-use isn't bad at all. It is however if the code you are re-using is in another program - in this case, IE10. It's code re-se gone topsy turvy.

If they merely wanted to re-use the code, then write it into Win8 so that Win8 can natively support the extra features and have IE10 leverage it off there. The way that it has been done here just seems to be a case of "Ohhh. IE10 does some shiny stuff, lets just hack up a way to use that rather than improve Win8 to do it on its own.".

Re:No longer a monopoly

[LordThyGod]

Aren't there things like system libraries for this kind of thing? Why would an OS be dependent on an application for core features?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[WorBlux]

Windows is already dependent on explorer to run, especially for file-system functionality. And why would you want to load code that does the same thing twice. If you already have something closely tied into the API that renders HTML 5, why not just use it? Seriously I don't think it's that big of deal, especially since hard drives are cheap and alternative browsers everywhere you look.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[shutdown -p now]

That's the point - it's not dependent on IE (the browser app), it's dependent on Trident (the engine - shdocvw.dll & mshtml.dll). In Windows 7, in editions where you could uninstall IE, it left the engine DLLs in place to satisfy the dependencies.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't strongly tying the browser to the OS one of the reasons they stuck with IE6 for 5 years? Code re-use is fine, but when you make it an OS component, then there is a higher resistance to changes/updates. Maybe they feel confident enough in Windows Update to take care of that now.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[TheInternetGuy]

Oh if only I hadn't spent all my mod points on women, wine and music.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[InspectorGadget1964]

Well, code reuse is neither good nor bad, it all depends on the quality of the code you are going to reuse. In the case of Micro$oft, since the code in IE is not all that good, the idea of reusing is is not something to be taken seriously. Also, IE is a browser. I can hardly think that a browser can provide some of the "core functionality" of an operating system. At least in serious operating systems, core functionality does not relate to bells, whistles nor appearances. When someone that develops serious operating systems refers to “core functionality” is generally speaking a reference to the robustness and efficiency of the operating system and modules of importance like networking, not to a lame GUI.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[deniable]

They could have easily moved the common code into a required DLL and made IE / Explorer UI code that talks to it. There's no need to graft 'IE' into the system. They own both so they can just refactor some of it into Windows and leave IE alone.

In other news, has anyone here removed IE8 from Windows 7?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[gfxguy]

I don't know. If they are pushing the-browser-is-the-os paradigm and gearing the whole OS towards pay-per-use online apps that can integrate more closely with your computer, then I can see why they are doing it. I don't like it, but I can see why.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[LordThyGod]

Yea, missed the point. It doesn't have to work that way, and probably doesn't even really work that way. Why do you need a boatload browser skin/UI cruft, to render html? Historically, MS did this so resellers could not remove IE in favor of "alternative browsers", which is what happened before the anti-trust shit hit the fan. Then, without even winking, they told congress that the OS was dependent on the browser and there was no way to remove it, or somesuch bs.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While I have no great love for IE or Microsoft, this alleged "change" seems a bit overblown: In Windows 8, as in past versions, there is a switch that removes any mention of iexplore.exe from obvious view; but the rendering components aren't touched, and are still available for use by any other program that wishes to invoke them.

Also, given that they are going to be implementing these functions in something, more-or-less-vaguely-standardish HTML5 is about the least proprietary thing one could hope for: .NET is pretty sketchy on non-Windows platforms, and is more or less entirely an MS leads, Mono has to precisely duplicate, game. Win32, despite team WINE's significant efforts, is also an uphill battle. HTML is the only one that MS would conceivably touch(it isn't going to be in Java, after all...) that is actually multi-vendor to a reasonable degree.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[JBMcB]

It's like saying movie maker is *required* to make the OS run because it's bundled with msvcrt.dll that a bunch of other things use.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PCM2]

If they merely wanted to re-use the code, then write it into Win8 so that Win8 can natively support the extra features and have IE10 leverage it off there.

Isn't that essentially what they're doing? IE has always been a DLL that you can embed in other programs. A friend of mine once embedded it in a Macromedia Director movie with about four lines of code. The only difference seems to be that now they're back to making it impossible to uninstall -- which is only logical, since they're building the new Start menu (Metro) out of HTML and JavaScript. In fact, to tell the truth I always thought the idea that you could "uninstall IE" was a sham that was just for show, to comply with the court rulings. The IE browser is just Microsoft's HTML and JavaScript engine with some chrome around it. Metro is the same engine with different chrome, and other applications that embed the engine use different chrome, and so on. Or am I missing something?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.

For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro, whereas those i showed 7 before it was released all wanted to know about features and what it could do, anyway for those that have seen film of metro in action they are using these little 'auto-updating" windows in the "desktop" that will have all kinds of feeds from weather to video, i bet my last dollar its all IE with DirectX under the hood which is why its tied in so deep and can't be backported. They do something similar with their Internet TV in windows 7 which uses IE and Adobe Flash tied together with some DirectX glue which you can tell by removing IE Flash or watching your GPU usage through the AMD System Monitor (don't know if there's a tool for Nvidia and Intel that shows how much load is GPU and how much CPU)

Personally i think windows 8 is gonna be the new Vista turkey and Windows 7 the new XP. I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent. That guy just doesn't have a fucking clue how to run a company and if he wasn't Bill's buddy from back in the day his ass would have never gotten past PHB middle management. kin, Zune, Vista, rushing the X360 when it had a fatal flaw, the man's resume is one clusterfuck after another and only the Office team being brought in saved Windows 7. Now I bet anything that Windows 8 Metro bullshit is HIS baby, its his classic "Me too, oooh me too!" badly done Apple ripoff that is just his style. at least Apple has the common sense not to try to stick iOS on the MBP, but someone forgot to give the sweaty monkey the memo.

Instead you are gonna throw away all the hard work the office guys did for Windows 7 by tying IE so damned tightly to the bowels of the OS that a single bug will slaughter the thing, all so Ballmer can have his own iPad OS bling bling nightmare on the desktop. are you listening Linux guys? you blew one shot with Vista DO NOT fucking blow it! We retailers want a simple as hell, all GUI, net friendly OS that is easy peasy for grandma and NO CLI. Hell you ALREADY have the basic idea with Expressgate/Splashtop, which is GUItasic and fast as hell. Write a ton of apps for it, make sure it works on the "80%" hardware, that the big three GPUs along with Realtek, SiS, Broadcom, Sigmatel and Aetheros and you guys could seriously kick some ass. This is your shot, and probably your last as i doubt the monkey will survive another epic fail, so do NOT miss, okay?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Fluffeh]

Yup, first thing I did on my laptop after downloading Firefox. (Well, first thing if you count "the four hours I spent un-installing garbage that came with it and tweaking things" as the first thing I did).

I have had no problems by doing so, though I don't like all that rubbish "flashy" stuff. A nice picture on the background and the plainest UI theme I can get is about as shiny a UI as I want. No point in doing any of the fancy rubbish when pressing ALT-TAB or the like. I will keep my CPU cycles and battery for things I need - like extra battery time, not asinine pretty-ness that might look nice for the first time you use it, then just becomes tedious and makes simple tasks take longer.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PCM2]

That's the point - it's not dependent on IE (the browser app), it's dependent on Trident (the engine - shdocvw.dll & mshtml.dll). In Windows 7, in editions where you could uninstall IE, it left the engine DLLs in place to satisfy the dependencies.

Which to me is not anything like the same thing as actually being able to "uninstall IE." How much code does it take to write the UI for IE versus the amount of code that goes into the rendering engine? For my money, IE has been a tightly integrated component of Windows all along, and naturally so, since you can hardly expect any modern OS vendor to ship an OS without an HTML engine. Even in those versions when Microsoft had to go through the song-and-dance of letting you "uninstall IE," all you were really doing was deleting the launcher icon that invoked the UI for the rendering engine.

And it's all moot anyway, because if you look at TFA, the actual quote from Microsoft is:

Asked whether it is possible to uninstall IE 10 from Windows 8 ... “We have nothing more to share about IE10 at this time beyond what in the guides and the IE Blog,” the spokeswoman said via e-mail.

So that's a big fat "we don't comment on unreleased products" and nothing conclusive whatsoever about whether the options for IE will be any different in Windows 8 versus Windows 7. The whole blog post is a speculative whine that isn't based on any kind of insider knowledge. Much ado about nothing.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, there's no real change here, in fact. IE removal always worked that way - it removes the browser, but not the engine.

Which kinda makes sense - after all, initially it was an anti-trust demand, and the product in question that was unfairly bundled was IE, so that is what gets removed. The rendering engine, by itself, is not in any meaningful way, shape or form a competitor to Firefox or Chrome or Opera. It may be a competitor to WebKit and Gecko in the market of "what library do I use to display embedded HTML in my own app?", but I haven't heard about any anti-trust concerns there.

As for the use of HTML5 in Metro in general... in Russian, there is a saying which translates as "If you can't defeat [them], lead [them]".

Re:No longer a monopoly

[webmistressrachel]

In fact, never mind the wine, or the music...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[shutdown -p now]

Which to me is not anything like the same thing as actually being able to "uninstall IE." How much code does it take to write the UI for IE versus the amount of code that goes into the rendering engine?

I don't know, but I'd assume at least an order of magnitude difference (esp. now that it has JIT compiler for JavaScript).

Look at it from the other side, though: to the user, the browser is the application, not the DLL - so it's really iexplore.exe (well, in reality it's probably "that blue e thingy" - I'm simplifying this a bit). When we talk about anti-competitive things, the original problem was that, when user installed Windows, he got IE icon right there and ready to go, whereas other browsers had to be installed. On the other hand, if you remove iexplore.exe and the icon while keeping the libraries, the end result for the user is that there's no browser on the system, so far as he's concerned - he can't directly use mshtml.dll to do what Firefox or Chrome do. So, as far as bundling goes, this is good enough to solve the problem.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[dissy]

Except nothing you described in your post supports saying "Yes".

By your given description, you have a working system so clearly IE is there, you didn't remove it.

If you can see your desktop, you are looking at IE. Start menu still there? That's IE too.
Open the computer icon to see files? That's also IE.

If you can login and see a desktop, you are USING IE.

If you can no longer login and run software and the system refuses to boot, then perhaps you have managed to rip out all of IE, but if that was the case you would have said so.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PCM2]

When we talk about anti-competitive things, the original problem was that, when user installed Windows, he got IE icon right there and ready to go, whereas other browsers had to be installed.

True to a point -- but to me that angle always seemed a little thin. I think a bigger part of the anti-competitive thing was that IE was a shitty browser that did things in divergent ways, but its market share threatened to steer the development of third party Web sites and applications toward an IE-only Web. A lot has changed since then, though. Downloading and installing stuff is now the norm (as opposed to the days when Netscape came on CD-ROM), IE isn't actually a terrible browser anymore, and Microsoft claims to be a big supporter of Web standards (including for Metro and JavaScript scripting for applications). So to me, being able to purge the blue icon completely from my system isn't really all that big a deal.

So, as far as bundling goes, this is good enough to solve the problem.

Well almost. If I'm not mistaken, in Europe the deal was that on first run Windows had to present you with an options screen, allowing you to use IE or optionally download and install one of the other browsers. Because the Catch-22 is that if you just say "no IE," naturally there's no way to download anything else! (Which is where the whole thing starts to get a little silly, if you ask me.)

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey baby, I've got mod points.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bmo]

>For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro.

Wait until they start using it. You ain't heard nuthin' yet.

--
BMO

Re:No longer a monopoly

[RobbieThe1st]

Just so long as there's a CLI /available/ (just like it is on Windows, I might add), I agree.
I'll say that it wouldn't take much - someone like Mint could easily do what you're asking; it'd just take a package manager that shows names of programs and hides other stuff. The driver support is nearly there if not already, it'd just be a matter of handling the whole NVIDIA distribution license VS GPL stuff... Or make it auto-download on first run. Or something.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Fluffeh]

As another user commented above, although IE is bundled with Win7, removing it leavesthe files required by Windows to keep running to be left there. I don't want this to get into a technical nit-picking about whether IE is really uninstalled and ripped out or whether I merely removed the majority of it through an uninstall. I have no Internet Explorer in any start menu, no webpage loads into it, I am content enough. I would have been happier if it hadn't come installed on my machine to start with - even if that meant that some sections of code meant for IE were installed anyhow.

My point here, and I think the general consensus is that I am (un)happy to do this in Win 7, but won't be able to do this in Win 8. At all. If I want to use Firefox, I will still have a copy of IE sitting there for all eternity.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Hadlock]

Yup, first thing I did on my laptop after downloading Firefox. (Well, first thing if you count "the four hours I spent un-installing garbage that came with it and tweaking things" as the first thing I did).

How much is your time worth to you? At $25/hr you might as well just install a fresh retail copy of Win7 on there and avoid the trouble of possibly having missed something, and also having a physical disc backup of the OS on the off chance something goes horribly wrong (very likely on a fragile laptop)

Re:No longer a monopoly

[drsmithy]

If they merely wanted to re-use the code, then write it into Win8 so that Win8 can natively support the extra features and have IE10 leverage it off there.

This is how every version of IE since IE4 - the one that got them into trouble - has been implemented. A model subsequently taken up by all the other vaguely significant platforms (OS X, KDE, GNOME) as well.

You are criticising Microsoft for something you want them to do, that they've been doing for the better part of 15 years, because you don't realise they're doing it.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[drsmithy]

Aren't there things like system libraries for this kind of thing? Why would an OS be dependent on an application for core features?

The vast majority of IE *is* a "system library", and has been since IE4.

It was changing IE to a system library that got them into trouble in the first place.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't the correct solution (regardless of the politics even) be to incorporate the IE rendering engine into the OS, and have IE as a separate product that uses said engine, but that can be uninstalled? The engine would be permanent, but any apps that use it could be uninstalled like any other app, without affecting core windows functionality.

So IE would/could use the same rendering engine, just like all windows apps could. Removing IE wouldn't remove the rendering engine, just the app frontend, so that when your system wanted to load a browser, IE was not among the choices.

It would then necessitate some way of downloading an alternative browser, without using IE - but since there are only 4 or 5 popular browsers, it shouldn't be too difficult to maintain a repository - say on windowsupdate?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, anything that would allow my web designer to whip up a driver for my ISA hardware in HTML5 is a good thing in my book.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PopeRatzo]

The new Metro stuff is largely HTML/Javascript, and it would make sense if it ran on the IE rendering engine.

I wouldn't mind so much if IE was much better than any other browser because it was integrated into the OS.

I still can't figure out why these built-in browsers that come with an OS are never as good as the standalone competition? You would think between Apple and Microsoft they'd be able to come up with a really great browser. I don't even know about all the technical stuff, only that neither IE or Safari are ever as nice to use as Chrome or Firefox or Opera.

I guess when it comes to browsers, you get what you pay for. Oh, wait...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want this to get into a technical nit-picking about whether IE is really uninstalled and ripped out or whether I merely removed the majority of it through an uninstall.

Oh, sorry about that. Those of us who do find that interesting or significant will stop feeling that way like a light switch in order to suit what you want. We regret not running it by you first, sir.

Or you could ... y'know, just stop participating in those sections of the discussion. You could even selectively quote posts that make several different points, omitting the parts that offend you in some way and responding to the ones you like. Just sayin'.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[DarwinSurvivor]

You mean a stripped down, barely scriptable GUI window that can't even be dynamically resized without going through menus? No thanks.

There is a reason every ssh client for windows uses a custom terminal for connecting instead of using the built-in one.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

then said rendering engine in a library, document it, and include it as part of the O/S that IE then depends upon, you don't make the O/S depend on apps, it's supposed to be the other way around

Re:No longer a monopoly

[datavirtue]

I'm a fan of Windows 7. I'm considered the Windows 7 guru at work (college IT dept), and I have been instrumental in deploying it at the college. However, on my most recent build (personal software/firmware/mobile development machine) I had Windows 7 queued up again in my New Egg wish list while I researched the best hardware and what not. Late in the build I decided to dump the Windows 7 license and use Ubuntu instead. Reflecting on this decision, I realized that cost was a factor (allowed me to get MUCH better hardware for the same price), the fact that Windows 7 Pro lacks certain advanced features available in Enterprise/Ultimate (not willing to pay $60 more over Pro), and the fact that I really do not need Windows anymore; all this led me to forgo Windows as my main OS. This is Dad's machine, but the family PC could also easily go to Linux if I didn't have to use the Pantech USB 3G device to get on the internet (no Linux support). Another thing I find is that the popularity of Apple is going to put WAY more pressure on Microsoft because people who use those products are OK with ditching Microsoft--Apple is popular with the average user even if they do not own the products. This and the popularity of Android will lead people to also accept Linux as a desktop OS more readily. Microsoft is looking at a perfect storm--Windows and Office relevance is waning fast.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it "cutting corners" to reuse IE's engine to power Metro and the browser itself? That's smart engineering, not "cutting corners".

Re:No longer a monopoly

[InspectorGadget1964]

I'll believe it when I see it. There are lots of users that still want to keep total control over their data. Think about doctors, lawyers, accountants, stock brokers just to name a few. Also companies that are in research and development will feel uneasy about having their data stored somewhere else. And even if the data is stored in your local machine but handled by a networked application, still being controled by a third party. I wouldn't put my data in their hands, specially if the OS is supplied by Billy gates and his cronies.....

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?

It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.

Why is it soooo damned hard to accept that NORMAL USERS ARE NOT LIKE YOU, they will NOT use CLI, they will NOT script their fucking programs, they will NOT read man pages, do the 'find the fix" forum dances, write code or give a wet fart about what kind of programming languages your OS uses, alright?

It is so simple folks, the key word is CONSUMERS in giant flaming 50 foot neon, but do you listen? Nope, you pretend that inside every grandma there is a C coder just dying to get out and little Suzy the checkout girl goes home to read programming books in the bathtub.

You are about to be given not one but TWO frankly once in a lifetime gifts on a silver platter and you watch, you'll just piss them both away and stay dead fricking last and you know what? if they hand you a 20 yard head start and instead of sprinting for the finish you promptly shoot yourself in the foot and start masturbating in the middle of the course YOU DESERVE TO LOSE just for throwing the fucking race!

You have gift #1, Windows 8 which I'm betting will make Vista look like a gold plated OS brought to you by $1000 hookers by the amount of sheer HATE I've gotten from the public after showing them the UI, and gift #2 you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook? NOT that resource intensive folks.

But you have to do things THEIR way, give them a product that will do what THEY want, and none of this fiddly CLI heavy geeker bullshit or YOU WILL LOSE period. I mean an OS with a fricking $1000 barrier to entry gained share during Vista while Linux stayed flatline, and despite all the hype even with the most wildly pulled out of your ass numbers the much vaunted Ubuntu is at the MAX maybe 3/4ths of a percent, even after all the press!

But you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same thing over and over AND over and expecting a different result. Me and the other retailers have practically drawn you a map on how to gain serious share, there has NEVER been a better time in history, with so many hooked on web based games and sites, and you have TWO gifts thanks to the sweaty monkey having no brain about to be dropped in your lap, what fucking more do you need? An engraved invitation?

Just give the consumer what they want, that's all. Either do that or just give up, quit all these "Next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" total horseshit, and accept that you only want to be a hobbyist OS for geekers. Because as it is hell you ain't even growing in servers any longer, in fact last numbers I saw had you losing share. you DON'T listen to the consumer, you DON'T listen to the retailers, you DON'T listen to the OEMs, instead you expect the entire planet to bend over backwards and learn to do things YOUR way. Arrogant much?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[nnull]

My mother for example uses the computer VERY little and doesn't do much with it. When it is time to upgrade (which is fast approaching) I am seriously considering ninja-installing a distro onto her machine and simply saying "This is the new computer, things are a little different" rather than going through the same thing while installing the latest and greatest from Microsoft. For her, there isn't any difference in finding all the buttons going from XP to Win 7 or Win 8. I may as well get her onto another OS totally.

I tried that before, and it ended disastrously. My mother uses Skype a lot and Skype is an utter mess in *nix, crashes a lot, not updated at all, and is just not as usable as it is on Windows. And no, using alternatives to Skype was not an option considering the alternatives are complete utter crap and not many people use them. I was thinking of getting her an Apple, but I just reinstalled Windows and she was happy again.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PaladinAlpha]

I agree with this so hard it hurts. There is an absolutely perfect opportunity here for OSS to do exactly what it's good at -- being more efficient and more available than corporate spaghetti -- but we're still spinning our wheels on usability because of pride. Ubuntu is the only one really blazing a trail, here, and they're catching flak for it (among other things they might deserve flak for *grin*).

The Turing test here is simple -- can someone with median computer knowledge sit in a room by themselves without internet access and get through a normal day? How about first-time setup? If not, it's not ready and it's a powertool. If so, we can make the world a better place. That's about the size of it.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[drsmithy]

They could have easily moved the common code into a required DLL and made IE / Explorer UI code that talks to it.

They did. In 1997. With Internet Explorer 4.

Every version of IE since has had the same architecture.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[m50d]

anyway for those that have seen film of metro in action they are using these little 'auto-updating" windows in the "desktop" that will have all kinds of feeds from weather to video

Hah, I remember that when it was called Active Desktop in windows 98.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Eskarel]

It's not exactly like that. I've had some hands on with the thing.

Essentially one of the ways you can build Metro Apps is HTML5 as UI with a proprietary javascript library which can make sandboxed system calls. These apps obviously need a rendering and javascript engine to run so they use the one from IE.

If you write your metro apps with XAML and C#/VB/C++ you won't use IE to deliver that.

I'm not convinced on Metro myself, but there's a reason.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Bert64]

The presence of the command line is not a problem.

Linux, Windows and OSX all have a command line... And infact MS have been working hard to improve their CLI in recent versions.

For day to day use average users will never have to touch the CLI on any of these systems... However the big difference is:

On windows the CLI is useless

When you ask a geek how to do something, on linux he will typically use the cli not because its the only way to do something but because its the best way. On windows the cli is rarely the best way, and often not even usable at all.

Also when it comes to supporting others, via forums or over the phone a command line is just easier to explain... On a forum you can cut+paste commands and have the user paste back the responses. Similarly on the phone the commandline is a similar paradigm since its conversation based. Trying to explain the layout of a gui over the phone is a huge pain in the ass because not only can you not see it, but the user's description of what they can see is down to the individual and might not make sense to you.
A CLI is easy to explain so long as you can read.

And on all systems geeks will mess with things that most users wont understand, wether it be the registry or a textual configuration file when you want to do something advanced or fix a major problem you need to delve deeper than most users will understand.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't make a sandbox sturdy enough to withstand Adobe's incompetence. IE9 - IE10 new malware target with hardware accelerated rendering and video BIOS perma p0wn. Cannot be removed effectively without a reflash from a dos/winPE boot disk.

Do you want to see *nudeCelebrity* or run First Person Shooter II Pro with Securom 11 just click "disable secure boot"
ntdll.dll hook to aes encrypted p0wn filesystem.

And no hint of relief for Linux from system BIOS vendors UEFI
 

Re:No longer a monopoly

[TheInternetGuy]

I find myself strangely lost for words, yet somehow I am posting this.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Bert64]

They're never as good as the standalone competition because they don't have to compete for users...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[syockit]

in Russian, there is a saying which translates as "If you can't defeat [them], lead [them]".

In Microsoft, there is a saying "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"

Re:No longer a monopoly

[wvmarle]

Their Windows monopoly was the issue, not their IE monopoly (which they didn't have yet). And you'd be hard pressed to say Windows doesn't have a de-facto monopoly these days. Just look into your average computer store, and see what OS is running on all those laptops they have for sale.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't make sense from a security point of view, though. The security holes are not in the UI, they are in the browser engine.

So essentially you're saying that Microsoft still doesn't care about security.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Gadget_Guy]

Wasn't strongly tying the browser to the OS one of the reasons they stuck with IE6 for 5 years?

Not at all. The fact that you can upgrade IE on XP shows that this is not the case.

The reason why IE stagnated was that there was no real opposition to compete against Microsoft's browser, and MS stupidly rested on their laurels and virtually disbanded their browser development department.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you offer some suggestions as alternatives?... I tried Ubuntu for a couple of months, but it has so many bugs and glitches it's ludicrous that they call it anything but a beta product. Then they came out with 11.1 and "unity" and now it's actually slower than Windows XP. From what I've seen most flavors of linux when it comes to the GUI are in beta form at best and still require a large amount of typing in a terminal window to get things working. Beyond a Mac, or Windows I don't really see any viable alternatives for a simple to use "just works" operating system.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[wagnerrp]

Seriously! I never did understand the reasoning for the Anti-Trust suit. Apple bundles with Safari. KDE uses Konqueror. GNOME comes with Epiphany. ChromeOS doesn't have a browser, because it literally is a browser. Why is Microsoft the only company not allowed to bundle their own HTML rendering tools?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

You miss the point. The average user is a point & click sorta guy, not the one who will read the manuals (how many people read the Windows manuals or even go through the Windows tour the first time they install any version of Windows?) Everything that an user needs, such as configuring networks, sound, printers, et al ought to be a simple plug & play - like you plug in an USB drive into your Linux box, and it should start reading right then (as it normally does). Configuring the network should be easy, and one shouldn't have to do a 'sudo system network restart' if the network stops responding (I had to do this a lot w/ Linux). As OS-X has shown, it ain't difficult either, and while its CLU capabilities are plain BSD, it's simple to do anything under their GUI as it is under the CLI. The point is that for the average user - be it grandma or little Suzy, they should be able to turn the thing on, and it should just prompt them for a few things, like their ISP logins, and maybe their IP addresses, and then from there on, work out of the box. On installation, Linux generally does fine, though.

Instead, everybody has been trying to apply the tablet paradigm and coming out w/ things like Gnome3.x and Unity. But do these 2 DEs eliminate the need to go to a CLI? It shouldn't be difficult - OS-X was derived from OPENSTEP, and GNUSTEP has been made to be as close to OPENSTEP as possible, so it should not be difficult for one to make something like it from GNUSTEP, which can be FOSS, and satisfy the software freedoms of the rms crowd, while also making it the front end for all system configuration. Internet connection unsure? Have something like a 'Repair connection' like Vista had. Essentially, everything that you need to do needs to be done from here. No kicking up a console, or editing files in the /etc/ directory while debating which is the best editor to do it in. In fact, while choices for things like word processors, spreadsheets, video players et al are good, why does there need to be 5 choices of text editors? And in GNUSTEP, one can from the Workspace Manager navigate through the entire directory structure and see all the files on the system. I remember in the early 90s, when I was in college, I had a horrible time w/ Unix, but the NeXTstations in the computer lab helped me understand and use everything I ever needed. Put something like that, somewhat polished, in front of the average user, and they'll pick up in no time.

Another major area is installation of new software - and please don't say 'sudo apt get ____' or 'yumm install opera'. How does one know the name of what to get? How does one know that if one wants apache, one has to type 'sudo apt get httpd', or if one wants gnome, gnome-panel? If one types one of those commands, will the software then go to the websites of apache or opera and start downloading, and how does it know? From what I've heard about Unity, whatever their other faults, their software center has it right - other DEs would do well to copy that. Oh, and while on this subject, can a distro without blinking pull down installation files, regardless of whether they are .rpm or .deb or .tar.gz and then do the full install? It's those sort of things that one is talking about.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[msclrhd]

The interesting case here (w.r.t. anti-trust issues) is not the uninstallation of IE10, or that you can use HTML5+JavaScript running on top of the Trident rendering engine for WinRT applications.

The interesting case is from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Windows_8_Integration:

    1/ Metro applications have limited interaction with Desktop applications, making switching between the two more complex (is IE10 using APIs that other apps don't have access to?).

    2/ Metro (using the WinRT API via C++/.NET/whatever) is a completely different platform. There are some common APIs (DirectX10/11, Direct2D, etc.), but there are no Win32 APIs, and different/limited APIs that replace them. For example, the socket and TCP/IP APIs don't allow you to connect to localhost when running under Metro. So the other browser makers have to port their programs to this new platform, giving Microsoft a lead-time advantage.

This is important considering that Metro is the users first experience with Windows 8 and that most users will access the internet from Metro (no need to go to the desktop to browse the internet).

    3/ Metro applications have to go through the Microsoft application store. Not sure what the implications are for this, such as how easy it is to get an application onto the store or what Microsoft's policies are for removal. May not be an issue for the major browsers, but the others may struggle (if they get to the point they have a working Metro application). What about Open Source code and browsers like Konquerer?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bertok]

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

Re:No longer a monopoly

[wertigon]

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. :(

Regarding Skype alternatives though, there are two things you can try; either set up a teleconferencing SIP server (like asterisk), or wait for the XMPP Jingle protocol to get multiparty-support (a couple of years wait). We use the Asterisk option at my work and it works like a charm and is much better than Skype, but as always YMMV.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[nightfell]

Or you can just install Windows...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[FireFury03]

Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?

It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.

Err, ok, I'll bite. Why is it a bad thing to make functionality available that non-technical users aren't going to want to use but technical users will find incredibly powerful?

It isn't like you *have* to use the CLI on any modern Linux (well, you do when things go badly wrong, but when things go *that* wrong under Windows you're even more screwed anyway so it's reinstalley-time for anyone non-technical in either case). The CLI isn't shoved in your face any more, but it is still there if you want it - you don't see the fact that there is a CLI *available* harming the Mac do you?

you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook?

Ok, and now you're contradicting your own argument. The "normal people" you are referring to do not, as a rule, go and install new operating systems on their existing hardware. They see their computer with its OS as a single device and if they want to change OS they will go to PC World and but a new computer with it preinstalled.

Linux has been "ready for the desktop" for some time (in that if a hardware vendor were interested and supplied a preinstalled system where they had certified that all the hardware in it worked with the OS, etc. then it would be fine for most home users). Unfortunately, none of the hardware vendors, except Apple, are interested in pushing a non-windows OS to general consumers (the offerings from the likes of Dell are very half-arsed and not really marketed well).

The only hardware vendor who is pushing preinstalled non-Windows OSes is Apple, and they are doing pretty well for themselves so it demonstrates that the public are often very happy to run something other than Windows, even though their Windows software won't run on it. However, Apple are only interested in their own OS, not Linux.

I'm afraid that the "customers only want Windows" mentality prevalent in the PC industry isn't going to go away any time soon, even though it is demonstrably incorrect, so even though Windows 8 is a complete crock I'm not expecting to see any mass migration to Linux. We'll see people upgrading to Windows 8 and cursing it, we'll see people sticking with Windows 7 as long as possible and we'll see people migrating to Apple Macs.

As a anecdotal example of Linux's readyness for the desktop, my fiancee isn't really that technical when it comes to computers - she can use them just fine, but I guess she would fall into the "normal user" category and will never start poking at them under the hood. Several years ago she chose to switch from Windows to OS X and did so without any real problems. She regularly uses my Gnome 3 laptop and has no problems with it. In fact, for the most part she's pretty blissfully unaware that it is running Linux.

Just give the consumer what they want, that's all.

The customer wants some hardware with an OS preinstalled on it. It doesn't matter whether that OS is Windows, OS X, Linux or something else so long as it is easy to use for "normal stuff" (word processing, web browsing, listening to music, watching videos). There is nothing more Linux software developers can do in this regard - a preinstalled Linux *does* do what the consumer wants. For what normal consumers want, there is no CLI fiddling required to make a preinstalled Linux work. It is now down to the hardware vendors - if the hardware vendors start pushing preinstalled Linux systems in a serious way then Linux is in a good position to take off. However, I have no faith that any large hardware vendor is going to do this.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Alioth]

Don't be so sure to count MS out.

Before a release, everyone has said how they hated the new interface. It happened with Windows 3.1 users when they saw Windows 95, it happened with Windows 98 users when they saw Windows XP, it happened with Windows XP users when they saw Windows Vista and Windows 7. But in the end, everyone just laps it up anyway when it comes out. The only real exception was Vista and that was because of problems other than just the UI changing.

The same will happen with Metro, everyone will whine but go ahead and buy it anyway.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[BenoitRen]

Because the Catch-22 is that if you just say "no IE," naturally there's no way to download anything else! (Which is where the whole thing starts to get a little silly, if you ask me.)

Bullshit. OEMs can pre-install web browsers, and there are other ways to get a web browser on the computer that don't involve an Internet connection. It's not like you need a web browser to download something over an Internet connection either.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[gbjbaanb]

As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP

no, DX10 wasn't written for XP because they wanted as many excuses as they could get to make you buy Windows 7.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[mvdwege]

You're kidding, right?

Let me oppose your anecdote with mine: I run Skype on three different platforms:

1. Linux x86 on my laptop.
2. Linux amd64, the most difficult environment, on my gf's workstation.
3. Windows XP x86, my gf's gaming partition.

None of them have any problems, at least not after I removed PulseAudio (Skype is an old fashioned app that directly wants to talk to the sound device).

Objectively, the Windows version has gotten worse with each release. The Linux client is a lean and mean app, only displaying a contact list and concentrating on chat and voice calling, it's core competencies. The Windows version has bloated up and takes up half the screen at 1600x1200 resolution with all manner of useless bling.

In short, Skype on Linux works perfectly fine in my experience, and a lot better than on Windows.

Mart

Re:No longer a monopoly

[BenoitRen]

For my money, IE has been a tightly integrated component of Windows all along, and naturally so, since you can hardly expect any modern OS vendor to ship an OS without an HTML engine.

I don't agree. You can hardly expect any modern OS vendor to ship an OS without a web browser, but a HTML engine? It should be removable together with the actual web browser. If an application wants to show a web page it can just call the default web browser like applications have been doing for over a decade.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[gbjbaanb]

it was because Microsoft bundled it and so killed Netscape's browser which was the de-factor standard back in the day.

In other words, they used their market monopoly position to destroy a competitor.

Now, there's a big difference between providing a HTML rendering library in your OS that you can use if you want to - like sticking webkit in as a default Windows dll, it's another thing to provide a browser application that cannot be removed. There was a lot of FUD about the difference between the 2 things during the court cases, where MS tried to say IE was the rendering library. Looks like they're trying the same thing all over again so your 3rd party apps will not use the library, but will have to have the whole IE shebang.

Oh, and no-one gives 2 figs about Safari, Konqueror or Epiphany. Not until Linux gets 90% share of the desktop marketplace (ans even then Epiphany and Konqueror will compete against each other thus preventing the same kind of problems MS inflicted upon us with their 'standard' IE6)

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Eggbloke]

I installed Ubuntu on my mums machine. One of my greatest decisions ever. It makes it so much easier for me to look after. I expect the next time I will have to do anything to it will be when 12.04 comes out.

Ubuntu really is quite easy for non technical people to use. Especially if all they do is web browsing and some word processing.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[d4fseeker]

Make sure you don't install dual-boot =)
As it happened to me, a parent accidentally booted Windows instead of Ubuntu and complained that the computer was "broken",
notabily that it had an ugly design, was kinda slugish to use and took forever to execute commands.
Well, what can I say. She loves Ubuntu on her ageing computer (not Unity interface tough) and the 2-3 apps she uses work flawlessly in PlayOnLinux.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PopeRatzo]

They're never as good as the standalone competition because they don't have to compete for users...

You mean because so many people are too lazy to use anything but what comes with the OS, right?

I guess you're right. I still don't quite understand why there would be hot competition to make a browser. It is not obvious how you monetize a browser besides making a certain search engine default. Maybe that's enough, but Mozilla doesn't own a search engine.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[marcello_dl]

You are assuming an OS depends on an application running over it.
Makes no whatsoever sense from a design point of view. But it does when prefiguring lock-in and fake standards strategies. So you're probably accurate.

In recent years, ms apologists kept repeating MS has changed, give them a chance. We'll see how right they are.
Those who've changed are maybe Apple and a bit Google.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

In the corporate environment it definitely matters how close IE is to windows. If a vendor can be guaranteed that every computer has IE on it they will be more likely to program their software to only support IE's shortcuts like how Active-X was used in the past.

More recently with the surge in firefox and chrome users I've seen vendors shift to more ubiquitous requirements. This also makes OSX and linux viable alternatives in some departments. (like retail sales and graphic design). Core departments like services and accounting are less likely to change and still depend on old standards which means IE.

If microsoft can get that back where it's guaranteed that IE10 is on every computer and IE10 also holds developmental shortcuts and back-doors into the main OS then many vendors will just go back to their old ways of making crappy code that only works with one platform because it's just easier to develop and support.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the exact same thing with my mother-in-law's computer and installed Ubuntu on it. It has worked out wonderfully until now. She uses her browser and word processor, and that is about it. The downside is that it is time to upgrade. So far I have resisted because I do not want to go through the process of teaching her the new way to do things. Why does *everybody* in the software world go out of their way to break things that work? There must be other things to do to keep them busy?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

de-factor standard

That's "de facto".

Don't use words and phrases that you cannot spell - it makes you look stupid. Or, in your case, more stupid.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[TheRaven64]

Have you ever tried to create a dynamic Windows GUI? There's a reason that a lot of apps came to the conclusion it was simpler to just embed some HTML forms...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[smooth wombat]

there isn't any difference in finding all the buttons going from XP to Win 7 or Win 8.

WHAT!!!??? There is a HUUUUGGGE difference in button location from XP to 7, let alone from 7 to 8. In XP, everything was there for the user to see. They could get to what they wanted in almost an instant.

In 7, everything is hidden. You can't get to what you want without a lot of hunting and hoping you get to where you want to go. Programs? Hidden. You have to open a secondary screen to seem them.

Want to see everything that is installed on your PC? You can't do that from one location in 7. You have to go to a second location to see everything else that isn't shown in the first location.

Want to turn off the annoying effects which slow things down? No longer is it a simple matter of going into display and removing the fade effects. Now you have to go several menus deep to find the same options and even then there are still effects which remain.

Windows 7 is a ginormous pile of steaming shit. It's as if the programmers went out of their way to make things harder for the user, more obtuse, more frustrating. Even simple things that administrators used to be able to do are now a round about cludge of turning things off so you can do what you need to get done.

To quote the tape deck robot on robot island:

WHAT?!

Re:No longer a monopoly

[elrous0]

No, Netscape killed ITSELF off. MS never blocked Netscape from being used, and for a long time I used it exclusively. But Netscape kept getting more and more bloated and began to really fall down on the job on website rendering. I finally went to IE when Netscape became so awful I just couldn't take it anymore. Now I use Firefox, and I'm really hoping they don't fall into the same hole. I would really hate to go to Chrome (not a big Google fan and I don't like Chrome's layout or lack of add-ons like NoScript).

Netscape can blame MS all they want to. But they have only themselves to blame, not Bill Gates.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[elrous0]

Ditto for me. I thought I could get away with installing Ubuntu on mom's computer and not have to deal with her virus problems ever again. But when I looked into it, I realized that she did a lot more with the computer than just browse the web. She uses a specialized program to connect the computer to her high-end sewing machine, for example (no Linux version available). She also uses Skype a lot. If I tried to put Linux on her machine, she most DEFINITELY would notice. And she would have my head for it.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[dskzero]

... I don't see what the big deal is. It isn't like it's going to bite you.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[AdamJS]

Well, with explorer and IE, you now have potential security exploits in your desktop environment itself.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[elrous0]

My local Best Buy probably sells almost as many Apple's as they do Windows machines these days. Every time I go in there, there always seem to be a lot more people in the Apple section than looking at the Windows machines. This isn't the late 90's. Go to any college campus and just look at all the Apple laptops.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[godefroi]

Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.

Bzzt. WPF for Vista and WPF for XP share the exact same codebase. My uneducated guess is that DirectX 10 not being backported to XP has something to do with WDDM.

For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro

You keep writing this. I swear I've read it about 15 times now. I'm sure Microsoft would like to know this, as it probably represents the most thorough and scientific market research they have available.

I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent

Personally I won't be bothered if Windows 8 makes it. As long as Metro can be disabled, it doesn't bother me at all. For tablets, it's probably the obvious choice. The Metro UI on WP7 is generally accepted to be quite functional (though I've never used it myself). As a retailer, it strikes me as odd that you'd wish failure on a product that has the potential to be a big seller itself, as well as a big driver of new hardware sales. Not that I'd defend Ballmer, I think he's made a general mess of things, as most short-sighted share-price-driven executive inevitably does.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Sinning]

Neither Windows nor IE need to be a monopoly for this to be illegal. The illegality comes from Microsoft using the market share of Windows to block competition in the web browser market. This bundling is anti-competitive behavior.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[CastrTroy]

Not only windows, but many third party applications require IE to be installed in order to function properly. I know this because I've run into two such apps (in the last 3 months) which failed to work properly because I had IE9 installed, which wasn't supported. There are tons of applications out there that require IE to be installed in order to work correctly. And I'm not just talking about reading help files. I'm talking about core functionality.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[TheLink]

Yeah, I use Linux, but mainly "CLI" coz the "popular" linux desktops are shit and have got even shittier. They're not good for the noobs. They're not good for the nerds. The Linux Desktop bunch should get a clue, if "screen" ( http://www.gnu.org/s/screen/ ) is still better and faster at task managing than your GUI, you've failed. If normal users are still having problems with sound, you've failed.

As for Windows, too bad reactos isn't making progress fast enough: http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

Otherwise it would be nice to see Microsoft sweat more (but not Ballmer tho ;) ) to actually come up with a better product .

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Amouth]

agreed - i test drove the beta - i could see it being usable on a single screen - but it's handling of multi monitor is horrrrrrid

Re:No longer a monopoly

[zeroshade]

IE has bitten me many times....big ole red welts on the massive rewrites of web site code for things that work standard in other browsers but require special IE handling...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[AdamJS]

Presumably he means not necessary for a single task. That is, there is a GUI option, hopefully easy for grandma to use, for any given part of the OS that needs to be changed. Along with that, a CLI can't be the fallback if the windowing system or desktop environment fails/crashes. The command interface or terminal should still be there, but for a consumer OS it has to be a third-class citizen to the first-class GUI. Unfortunately, while you see the Ubuntu guys somewhat getting the idea, they went off the deep end with Unity. Quite sad.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[wvmarle]

Markets differ... Apple has always been strong in their home market. Here it's all Windows that I see in the shops. Not counting tablets of course, but laptops and desktops.

Now for the numbers and statistics. Wikipedia mentions a market share of just under 11% for Apple in the US. netmarketshare.com and statcounter.com give about 6.5% worldwide for Apple. And about 1% for Linux. The rest, 92.5%, belongs to Windows.

No it's not late 90s anymore, and Windows is down from some 96-98% back then, but this is still well into monopoly territory. It seems also that your sampling is not representative for the market as a whole.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Read all of what he says... you're just proving his point.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Aryden]

really? I haven't had any issues like this and I have heavily modified my install of 7. Shit dude, that thing in the bottom left called start, yeah click it and in the little text box, TYPE WHAT YOUR'RE LOOKING FOR. damn...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[elrous0]

Yes, but the fact that Windows is so dominate is due in large part to the fact that they are so strong in enterprise/business sector (and that Apple is pretty much completely focused on the consumer sector). I bet if you factored out business, and just looked at the consumer level (where people actually have a *choice* in the matter), you would find Apple with a MUCH better market share than 11% in the U.S. Many people use Windows at work only because they have to, but have Apple at home. Outside of the business sector, Apple is a very viable and increasingly popular alternative to Windows. And they could be much stronger in the business sector too if they didn't choose to focus on consumer sales.

The days when it was Windows or nothing (from when OS/2 died in the mid-90's until the mid-00's, I would say), are long over.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

My mother for example uses the computer VERY little and doesn't do much with it. When it is time to upgrade (which is fast approaching) I am seriously considering ninja-installing a distro onto her machine and simply saying "This is the new computer, things are a little different" rather than going through the same thing while installing the latest and greatest from Microsoft. For her, there isn't any difference in finding all the buttons going from XP to Win 7 or Win 8. I may as well get her onto another OS totally.

Why is it time to upgrade then?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[sglewis100]

I still don't quite understand why there would be hot competition to make a browser. It is not obvious how you monetize a browser besides making a certain search engine default. Maybe that's enough, but Mozilla doesn't own a search engine.

Can't find a more current link right now, but they don't need a search engine.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[scot4875]

I think a bigger part of the anti-competitive thing was that IE was a shitty browser that did things in divergent ways, but its market share threatened to steer the development of third party Web sites and applications toward an IE-only Web.

Back in the late '90s when this all took place? Back when our choices were Communicator (please god no), IE5.5, or IIRC, a paid version of Opera? While it's true that IE did offer an ActiveX container to let sites run custom controls, it's not like that couldn't have been implemented by anyone else (whether it would have been a good idea or not is an entirely different story.) Linux and MacOS (pre-OSX even) would have been out of luck until someone ported the custom controls to their environment, but that's not significantly different than the plug-in architecture we have today for things like Java and Flash.

I always thought the IE issue was pretty dumb. There are (or were) any number of things that the DOJ case could have focused on in terms of anti-competitive actions by Microsoft -- like forcing Windows to be installed on every computer shipped -- and instead they took issue with Microsoft providing an internet browser out of the box with their operating system. Something that *every* competitor was doing at the time.

--Jeremy

Re:No longer a monopoly

[scot4875]

Have you checked with your college bookstore? There's a very good chance that you're eligible for student pricing for Microsoft products. I was able to abuse it and get several copies of 64-bit Win 7 Ultimate for $10 apiece shortly after it came out.

That's not to say that Ubuntu won't meet your needs; for most applications it will be fine. But most software companies do have heavy student discounts -- I'd definitely recommend taking advantage of them while you can.

--Jeremy

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Grishnakh]

Another major area is installation of new software - and please don't say 'sudo apt get ____' or 'yumm install opera'. How does one know the name of what to get?

This is a solved problem for most distros; we have GUI programs like Synaptic which will let you browse through your repositories and see all the software available, search by keywords, etc. Most of use just say "sudo apt-get install programname" on forums because 1) it actually works on a Debian-derived distro, 2) it's much faster than using Synaptic, and 3) it's a hell of a lot shorter than telling someone, "open up Synaptic, click on (something) to search for "programname", and follow these steps to install it...".

If one types one of those commands, will the software then go to the websites of apache or opera and start downloading, and how does it know?

No, synaptic, apt-get, yum, etc. go to your distro's repository to download pre-compiled software. Things like Apache don't distribute binary software, only source. It's up to the distro (like Ubuntu) to compile it for you, make sure it works together, make minor tweaks, etc.

From what I've heard about Unity, whatever their other faults, their software center has it right

This has nothing to do with Unity, and everything to do with Ubuntu. Unity is just a "skin"; you can run any DE you want and still use Synaptic or whatever other nice GUI program they use, and still have access to all the same repositories. DEs have nothing to do with package installation.

The things you're talking about here are all solved problems. In fact, for the most part, I really can't think of any time I needed to go to the CLI in Kubuntu or Linux Mint, except when I was doing stuff that a Farmville/Facebook fan would not be doing. For just browsing the web, connecting to a wireless AP, running office programs, etc., if you have to go to the CLI to fix something, there's a serious problem; most mainstream Linux distros have eliminated that.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[shutdown -p now]

The proper way to deal with security holes in the library is to fix the library. IE is no exception.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[lwriemen]

Windows still has the market share it did before the antitrust case.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

There are many other corroborating sites.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[pakar]

List services:
# service --status-all
List processes for the current user
# ps
List processes for all users
# ps -e
List processes for all users (including executing user)
# ps -ef

So... how hard was that?... Oh.. you want to store it to a file... add >file.txt to the end...
Or if you want to do something more exciting...
List processes, sort by user and pid.
# ps -ef --sort user,pid
List processes, sort by used cpu-time.
# ps -ef --sort pcpu
Or how about listing processes on another system...
# ssh root@192.168.0.254 ps -ef

Or how about doing this...
# ps -ef |grep bash |awk '{print "echo process "$2" running, used cputime "$7" using terminal "$6"; echo messing with your terminal >/dev/"$6}' |sh
lists all bash-processes, prints a nice list with some information and then writing a message to the user(s) console(s)...
This command would generate output like this:
echo process 2842 running, used cputime 00:00:00 using terminal pts/0; echo messing with your terminal >/dev/pts/0
echo process 3127 running, used cputime 00:00:00 using terminal pts/0; echo messing with your terminal >/dev/pts/0
and the |sh on the end it to actually execute the commands...

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

(the above stuff is just for demo purposes... it's not the recommended way to do it. It's just to show the functionality..)

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Billly Gates]

In the 1990s you had 2 options to go in the net. PC or $$$ Unix workstation. Guess which one had 95% marketshare? With bundling and OEM deals IE took over and extinguished the net. Today MS can not do that.

More people in 5 years will be accessing the web from phones, tablets, and tiny netbooks running blackberry, IOS, Andriod, etc. This will be especially true in Asia and South America where the countries are poorer and these are more affordable than a full blown computer.

Linux is a dream and will never grow beyond 1% but other mobile platforms the market is much bigger.

Even if MS were to make their own HTML, own activeX garbage, own convulted way of not following standards like they did with IE 6, it would fail. My guess is 50% of all internet users will be using portable operating systems and webmasters simply would ignore the lock in.

I look forward to IE 10 as it is much better for I.T. departments and people who do not know any better and is a real competitive browser unlike the past decade. It can't ever take over again. It can't happen today.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bonch]

For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro, whereas those i showed 7 before it was released all wanted to know about features and what it could do

This is silly. Your personal experience doesn't reflect how everyone is going to react to something. Also, people often mock products that turn out to be successful, such as the iPad.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bonch]

There is no explanation except that, because it's Microsoft, everything they do must be evil according to many readers of Slashdot.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[heneon]

heh, this looks like a copy from the manuscript of the "Hitler finds out it /still/ isn't the year of Linux desktop" Downfall parody!

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PCM2]

Bullshit. OEMs can pre-install web browsers, and there are other ways to get a web browser on the computer that don't involve an Internet connection. It's not like you need a web browser to download something over an Internet connection either.

Tell it to the EU. I'm not arguing that it''s physically impossible to install a Web browser without downloading it over the Web. I'm just saying what the EU mandated.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PCM2]

Back in the late '90s when this all took place? Back when our choices were Communicator (please god no), IE5.5, or IIRC, a paid version of Opera? While it's true that IE did offer an ActiveX container to let sites run custom controls, it's not like that couldn't have been implemented by anyone else (whether it would have been a good idea or not is an entirely different story.)

I'm not really referring to ActiveX, I'm talking more about IE's screwball implementation of Web standards. Back in those days, people prided themselves on how effective their JavaScript browser detection routines were, so they could load quirky code to get results in different browsers. In enterprise settings, a lot of people just said "screw it," and wrote their sites to work with IE (which meant they wouldn't look right in standards-compliant browsers). Some people interpreted it that Microsoft's browser just sucked because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to write a good one, but some people saw it as "embrace and extend," just like Microsoft tried to do with Java.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Jerry]

For her, there isn't any difference in finding all the buttons going from XP to Win 7 or Win 8. I may as well get her onto another OS totally.

Going to Win7 is one thing, going to Win8 is a can or worms. Trying to install Linux on a Win8 box is something else. Microsoft has forced PC OEMs to enable EUFI as a condition of Win8 certification, while claiming the enabling or disabling of EUFI is up to the PC OEMs. The PC OEMs point to the EUFI certification requirement. With profits razor thin and often depending on Microsoft ad rebates, the chances a PC OEM will tell Microsoft to buzz off and sell their PCs with the ability to dual boot or install Linux is next to none.

The EUFI does not address the primary and major vulnerability of most PCs ... which is Windows itself, while it is running. But, that's not really the purpose of the EUFI, contrary to all the PR about it.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Jerry]

Netscape can blame MS all they want to. But they have only themselves to blame, not Bill Gates.

That is so much patent nonsense, and you know it. Are you a "Technical Evangelist" astroturfing /.?

It is reminiscent of the same problem alternate software and OSs have today. After Microsoft started BUNDELING IE with their OS PREINSTALLED on the OEM PCs, users who "only want to point and click" did not have to download Netscape to be able to browse the web. All they had to do was fire up IE. Sure, Netscape was much better than IE, but IE was "good enough" and it came with the machine, preinstalled, most users didn't bother to install Netscape. THAT is why IE beat Netscape.

I also suspect that Microsoft added code to make Netscape misbehave. Absurd you say? Did you read the Dr DOBBS Journal article which revealed the code they discovered in Win 3.1 which stopped installation if it encountered DRDOS 4.0 on the HD? The DDJ used a hex editor and replaced that section of code with NOPs (no operations) and retried the install. Win3.1 installed fine and ran even better on DRDOS than on MSDOS. Then there's that old nugget "Gates says the OS isn't done till Lotus won't run". And, a few years ago a mobo maker, Foxconn, had an MS certified BIOS which checked for Linux and if found sent it to various vectors randomly. It was verified by modifying the firmware to point to the same vectors Windows did and reburning the BIOS. The Foxconn mobo ran Linux just fine after that. Then there is the existence of the digitial terrorist gang, a.k.a. "Technical Evangelists", ruled by Microsoft employee James Plamondon. His role in a variety of scams and astroturfs for Microsoft became public knowledge in the Combs vs Microsoft trial. Embarrassed, he did a Mea Culpa and confessed. He also said that MS was still pulling off that kind of crap and as long as they are doing it the market is not free, to paraphrase him.

Microsoft is still doing the crap. Walmart began selling netbooks with Ubuntu installed and they flew off the shelf like hotcakes. Microsoft "re-evaluated" Walmart's per copy license fee and Walmart quickly moved that netbook to their online store, then failed to re-stock it. The DELL fiasco was a similar story. The new EUFI locks on HD block Linux sharing or replacing Win on the HD. Microsoft requires PC OEMs to enable EUFI "for security reasons" before they can get Win8 certification, but claims that the PC OEMs are free to issue keys to whom ever they want.

EUFI is a strange beast. It doesn't help with the fundamental problem of security on PC, that of running Windows itself. Keyboard loggers being allowed to set on the MBR is only one of hundreds of security problems Windows has, the the EUFI doesn't necessarily fix that.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Bert64]

Well, Netscape used to successfully sell a browser and used it to promote sales of their web server software...

Microsoft were pretty desperate to scupper the browser as a platform, because cross platform applications render their monopoly irrelevant and could potentially bankrupt them.

Mozilla, Google and others don't want microsoft to control the browser market because then they can destroy the idea of cross platform applications and keep people tied to windows...

It's not all about monetising browsers, its about the fallout to other areas that the browser market will cause.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[webmistressrachel]

:-) I couldn't resist. Sorry...

Re:No longer a monopoly

[PopeRatzo]

Mozilla, Google and others don't want microsoft to control the browser market because then they can destroy the idea of cross platform applications and keep people tied to windows...

I understand that, but not wanting Microsoft to destroy cross platform apps is not going to put money in Google or Mozilla's pockets, and as far as I can tell, they're not in business just to set things right with the world.

Maybe Google, but I just can't imagine Mozilla is going through the trouble of ongoing development of Firefox just to thwart Microsoft. Somewhere, somehow, there has to be money in it directly for them, and that's the part that I'm not smart enough to figure out.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bertok]

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

It's very, VERY hard. So difficult that you failed to solve the rather trivial problems I gave. You gave me something that is incomplete, and does something only vaguely similar, yet is still complex and wrong.

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems. I want commands for a CSV file from both data sources, not just one, because I want you to sit down and figure out it, and realise that you'll end up with two very different solutions, even thought the problem description is nearly identical: get some data, format it.

Your SSH command is for one machine only, and doesn't include the machine name in the output as a column. Sure, it vaguely does what I said, but what I want to do is compare the CPU times of processes across my farm of servers using Excel. Does you solution do that? No.

Your "awk" version is even more complex, doesn't include proper column headers, and won't escape quote characters correctly.

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format". Err... obviously. What exactly is "full format"? Who knows! It's... something fuller than not-full format, clearly. It has it's own sort syntax, different to the sort syntax of other commands. It outputs tabular data, but god only knows in what format exactly. It certainly doesn't have the same output format as any other command. Notice how the exact same option to "service" is not "-ef", but "--status-all". Does "service" have a "sort" option? Nope.

Meanwhile, in Windows land: Sort-Object (or just "sort") works on the output of every command exactly the same way. The Format-Table" and Format-List commands work, again, exactly the same on the output of every command. There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

I mean, for God's sake, even just this bit: "ps -ef |grep bash" has a subtle error in it. What happens if a user's account name contains the character string "bash?" As in, say, BobAshfield or something? You get unexpected, spurious output. This is what happens when you blindly use string processing to perform database-like functionality. You have a table of data that you want to filter by a column. Why do a text-search instead? What you meant was:

      Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'bash' }

Or more elegantly:

      Get-Process -Name 'bash'

But there's an alias for Get-Process (ps), and the "name" is the default... so:

      ps bash

will work, if you must save those precious keystrokes.

But why would you? Everything tab-completes in PowerShell, even the parameter names.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Super_Z]

Try to run your cherry-picked examples in a mixed OS (heterogenous) environment. Unlike PowerShell, Bash and its brethren are designed to be portable, support the Unix/Posix standards and be backwards compatible with sh.
If you want to look at a shell with a more powerfull syntax, try e.g. rush (which unfortunately seems to be an inactive project ).

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

Notice I got modded down and will CONTINUE to get modded down for at least two days in unrelated subjects? This is what I find funny about the teabagger wing of the FOSSies, they think by burying anything that isn't "Gee isn't Linux perfect for the world? Why it sure is Skip, and RMS's farts smells like roses and cure AGW!" they can magically "make it not true! make it all go away, I can't hear you la la la!".

But the funny thing about the truth, one can always produce facts to back it up. Like how Dell have to run their own repos because the current driver model is so fucked up that if they dare to run the default repos the machines will shit all over themselves. not opinion, cold hard fact. How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks which should tell you something, when people would rather have a decade old fisher price GUI than the latest and greatest because its too fiddly and a PITA, or how about how the ones that invented the netbook ASUS has given up on the bullshit? I would bet my last dollar their support costs were THROUGH THE ROOF because of "update foo broke my stuff!" along with having to try to walk someone through a three page CLI "fix" over the phone. I bet the metrics on the calls were just nuts, or how about the kings of "low price at all costs" Walmart running away from Linux as fast as it can which again I bet my last dollar the support costs killed it. don't see that with the iShiny, even though that is about as unfamiliar a UI as you could get for a lifelong Windows user you do you? Maybe because they make it intuitive and easy instead of flipping the user the bird and typing "RTFM Windblowz Luserz LOL!"? How about how the community has the nerve to actually CELEBRATE 1% market share like that is something to be proud of when IRL after TWENTY YEARS of work Linux is actually lower than JavaME and the craziness and logic hoop jumping by the lunatic fringe has gotten so bad there is actually a website that turns the bullshit and excuses into memes which you then see once you know what to look for over and over AND OVER again.

You see, that is the thing about the truth, they can call me "nigger cocksucker faggot" all day long, aka shill troll astroturfer but you know what? It doesn't make black into white, up into down, nor can it change a single number or add a single user to the crazy parade. We retailers have been fucking BEGGING you to straighten your shit and give us some real choice, we have practically DRAWN YOU A MAP and handed you a GPS to keep you from getting off track, and now the competition is gonna give you a fricking 60 yard head start in the hundred meters by shooting itself in the foot TWICE with the fucked Windows 8 GUI and all those late model P4s and early dual cores being EOLed that could play farmville and run FB just fine.

NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY has so much been in your favor, your competition is run by an idiot, now more than ever before the world is doing more and more of their work and play exclusively online, and the visionary behind the second front has died and left a vacuum that they may not be able to fill. Oh and the economy sucks so folks want to save money and are willing to try things that will help them do so. You have the market wide open, the field is yours, so what do you do? say "Don't look at me!" and promptly start waving a gun around the track while masturbating to a Bash script.

But you've run out of exc

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

Thank you AdamJS that is EXACTLY what I mean, although I was downmodded (and if like the last time will be on unrelated subjects for a day or two) for saying it. I deal with users 6 days a week, not programmers, not compSci majors, users. people like Sherry who is the checkout girl at the local grocery, or Brian who runs a backhoe or terry the truck driver. if I sell a PC to these people I need the GUI to work and not be an afterthought which sadly ATM in Linux it pretty much is. I need to be able to easily and simply walk them through basic tasks using ONLY the mouse and preferably with as few clicks as possible, because one mistyped word in bash can equal disaster and I can't afford to give away free lifetime support.

With Windows if a customer has a problem a good 85%+ of the time I can straighten them out in less than 4 minutes in control panel, if that. hell with windows 7 HP I can even take remote control of their PC in under 3 minutes with Remote assistance, all GUI and so trivial and simple I walked a 73 year old woman through initiating a remote request when she messed up her sound and was afraid to go into control panel. again it was trivial, easy, and because I was willing to take a few minutes out of my day to help that woman at no charge I ended up with 3 repairs and a new build, as she ended up insisting her entire family use me as their shop.

But Linux simply isn't close to that level, or as you said "make the GUI a first class citizen' and in fact there is a large vocal minority that actively fights to NOT make things easier for the user, which they look down upon as "noobs". If this attitude doesn't change, if distros don't insist that the programs they carry have a first class GUI and that ALL major and minor non edge case tasks have a functional GUI then it really is never gonna gain any share.

What is driving me up the wall about it is the clock is ticking. already I'm seeing late model P4s and early dual cores being traded in by the crate because XP is getting close to EOL. These machines could EASILY run the apps people use now like Farmville and Facebook, Hell I'm seeing Athlon X2s and Pentium Ds with a Gb of RAM, that is MORE than plenty. And Windows 8 looks to be another Vista turkey, and when you throw in the facts that the economy is down (so folks will happily buy refurbs to save money) and more and more of my customers do NOTHING with their PC that isn't net related? you have the "perfect storm" for FOSS adoption. and I think the idea of FOSS, of ending planned obsolescence and putting the user as the ultimate master of the machine, are good and just ideas.

But sadly I get the sinking feeling that this golden opportunity will be thrown away, like all these trade ins i'm getting that frankly the cost of new Windows licenses will make not worth the effort. and in the end it is NOT because FOSS is a bad idea, or that there simply isn't the skills to get it done, but the simple fact that like we have seen in politics the hardcore fanatics have hijacked the platform and are pushing FOSS not as a way to help people, but as an agenda. Its all about making those "noobs" do things THEIR way and if they won't? well they can just go back to windBlowz. and that is EXACTLY what is gonna happen. the shop owners like mine will shake their heads at the insanity, strip as much parts as they can, and throw billions of dollars worth of gear in the trash while lining our shelves with Windows machines.

Not because we are "shills" or astroturfers or M$ Ninjas, not because we are unwilling to learn new ideas, but just because nobody will listen to us. Just like they haven't listened to us for over 20 years, just like they ignored us when Vista came out and we begged for an alternative, nope we'll get told "Make 'em learn bash and RTFM windblowz luzer LOL!" and we'll leave the Linux Bash trolls to their CLI circlejerks and go on about our days.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[TheInternetGuy]

Slashdot just cooked me up a fresh batch of mod points. Even says "Use 'em or loose 'em!" right there next to the announcement. ;-)

Re:No longer a monopoly

[bertok]

Lets so how non-Windows we can get. There's VMware ESXi, the bare-metal hypervisor that's not even a POSIX operating system. It has PowerShell support. So does Citrix XenServer, which is Linux/Xen based. (So does Microsoft Hyper-V, of course, but that doesn't count as non-Windows). That's just off the top of my head. Not that it matters, because Windows PowerShell is not surprisingly, a Windows technology. No Windows administrator cares that their Windows automation scripts don't run on their Solaris boxes.

Anyway, bash scripts aren't cross-platform either. I mean, sure, the actual bash interpreter is written in just POSIX C and can be ported to anything (I've used it on Windows myself), but that's useless with the external commands. ALL OF WHICH ARE DIFFERENT, even on one platform! Have you seen the horror that is a truly "cross-platform" script? It begins with pages and pages of if-else statements to figure out what's what, and how stuff works. Then there's ten lines of actual script.

Here's a random example from a script found with this google search:

elif [ "$os" = "OpenBSD" ] ; then
    $echo "/etc/passwd.conf :"
    egrep -v "$comments" /etc/passwd.conf

elif [ "$os" = "HP-UX" ] ; then
    $echo "/etc/pam.conf :"
    egrep -v "$comments" /etc/pam.conf

else
    $echo "/etc/pam.d/passwd :"
    egrep -v "$comments" /etc/pam.d/passwd
fi

if [ "$os" = "Linux" ] ; then
    $echo "pwck -l"
    pwck -r
    grpck -r
fi

Cross platform my ass.

Anyway, lets go back to our earlier, trivial example: "ps"

Here's two google hits: Linux, and Solaris.

Sure, they're vaguely similar, and have a bunch of options in common, but that's where it ends. Formatting is all different. Filtering has different capabilities. I bet the output is different also.

So put or up shut up. Write me a script, quickly (and I stress that word for a reason -- time is money), to do exactly the following task, across a bunch of different unixes:

Output all processes with the name "bash" into an RFC 4180 compliant comma separated values (CSV) file. Do not include extraneous processes. Don't forget the header. Make sure quotes and spaces are correctly handled. Ensure Unicode is handled on platforms that support it (e.g.: Solaris). Make sure numbers are formatted consistently, irrespective of the operating system regional options. Ensure that every platform outputs exactly the same columns, in the same order. Have it work on, at a minimum: AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, OpenBSD, and Linux. Your time starts now... go!

Re:No longer a monopoly

[DarwinSurvivor]

Right, because a single example proves the superiority of an entire user interface. Fine, 2 can play at that game. Here is something I have ACTUALLY used (about a month ago), and without the need for google.

Try creating an ISO file on computer A of a CD inserted in the drive of computer B in a single command.

ssh user@computer_b "dd if=/dev/cdrom" | dd of=/home/user/some_disk.iso

Please note that that was not using some one-off command that was specifically designed to perform cross-network disk copying, but the combination of 2 VERY flexible commands that can be re-purposed for an almost unlimited number of operations. Hell, I could change it to copy the disk form computer B to a blank disk on computer C by running the command on computer A by simply adding 1 utility to my single command.

ssh user@computer_b "dd if=/dev/cdrom" | ssh user@computer_c "cdrecord -d /dev/cdrom -"

Re:No longer a monopoly

[DarwinSurvivor]

if "screen" ( http://www.gnu.org/s/screen/ ) is still better and faster at task managing than your GUI, you've failed. If normal users are still having problems with sound, you've failed.

Really? Because I haven't seen either of those limitations hurting windows much. Believe it or not, I would rather use screen than the crap interface in windows (YES I have used 7) and sound is STILL a pain in the ass to get working with any windows version that was not pre-installed without trudging through the hardware manufacturer's website.

It was years ago that linux became better than windows at both window management and hardware support, saying otherwise is FUD.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Stuarticus]

Why pay the Microsoft tax once when you pay it twice?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh you DO realize your commands won't work in Windows either so saying "its inter-operable" while ignoring it won't work with the most popular OS in the world is SERIOUS logic hoop jumping, yes?

I DO think you accidently hit upon the problem though without realizing it, and its the way the Linux community hangs onto that "Unix/Posix" horseshit. Unix has been dead damned near 20 years, okay? When Unix was popular and all these "Unix" standards were written computer memory was more precious than gold and CPU resources practically didn't exist. It didn't matter how much of a hoop jumping verbose clusterfuck something was as long as it saved precious memory and cycles, that in the end was all that matter when the average home computer had less power than a $1 watch today and big iron ruled.

But it ain't 1978 anymore yet the community clings to "The Unix way" like its their own blue blankie or something! Ultimately the community would be better off to throw out that old Unix/Posix bullshit and start over with modern machinery in mind. I bet my last dollar if the Unix/Posix crap was banhammered the community could come up with something easy to read and use, elegant, fast, and which worked wonderfully.

Do THAT and MSFT would have no choice but to support it as every admin would want to use it. but as that other guy pointed out MSFT is sinking serious money behind powershell and giving away GUI IDEs and adding to its power and as he pointed out ATM it is simply a better product. Its easier, its commands are consistent, it doesn't take 50 commands just to do the most common tasks, in short its just better. but instead of doing the smart thing and learning from your competition I have no doubt you'll just insult me and mod me down and THAT is why linux isn't gaining ANY real traction. The other guys learn and modernize while the community hangs onto the old ways like a hippie hanging onto bell bottoms and 8-tracks. The 70s is over, let it go okay?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[SomeStupidNickName12]

It isn't just that the apple is completed on the consumer/retail sector its that they have no enterprise/business strategy.

We do a lot of mobile development iphones/ipads etc and we have had a lot customers saying can you source a 100 ipads for us and unfortunately we can't. We tell them sorry please go to the retail store down the road.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[BenoitRen]

You mean it's easier to create web pages for IE's buggy rendering engine and JavaScript engine?

Re:No longer a monopoly

[hairyfeet]

BWA HA HA HA HA AH HA HA HA....damn, that is funny! That is why my 70 year old dad, faced with NOTHING but a Windows 7 disc and a blank computer had no sound and everything broke....oh wait a tick, it ALL "just worked" and took less than 15 minutes. The worst question it asked him? "Are you at home or at work?" so it could set up the firewall rules. hell it even popped up a little message on first boot that said "You don't have an antivirus, would you like me to show you a page with several different antivirus programs to choose from?" and gave him a choice of free and pay AV.

I'm sorry but until you can hand someone a blank machine and a Linux CD and with NO googling or forum dances or anything else have them able to install AND update it without broken hardware? that would be a fail.Go to ANY forum, your choice, and look at the pages and pages of hardware fails. the sad part? Most of it is what I call the 80% hardware, that's the hardware that is on 80%+ of machines and should NEVER break on initial install, the Realtek, SiS, broadcom, aetheros, and the big three GPUs.

But now instead of facing the fact your driver model be busted you'll just insult me, or make excuses. Its the OEMs fault, its the hardware manufacturers fault, its everyone else's fault. you know what they say about excuses and assholes right? A final little fact you can't excuse, the fact that Dell has to run their own repos even though they only offer Linux on a TEENY TINY SUBSET of their hardware. you know why they have to run their own repos friend? because one of the top four OEMs on the planet can't even run the default repos on a tiny subset because the drivers in linux shit themselves and die hard if they do. explain THAT away friend. Linux has better hardware support....BWA HA HA HA HA!

Re:No longer a monopoly

[pakar]

as i wrote... "(the above stuff is just for demo purposes... it's not the recommended way to do it. It's just to show the functionality..)"..... ie it's not the optimal way.. it's just for demo-purposes to show how pipes and such are much more powerful to manage output from a command...
The good thing about this is that i can write a minimal shell-script that does something and parse the output with whatever command i might want.. Or even pipe the output from a command to a shell-script that does something more advanced with the output...

Please learn how to read...

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems.

Ever heard about import data in excel?... you can use comma, tab, spaces or whatever you would like to import data... it does not have to be a cvs file... But if you would like.. You can even right-click on the file and select open with excel and it will go into import-mode... So... the problem is?

But sure.. i'll bite...
ps h -o "`hostname`,%p,%y,%x,%c"
and the "cryptic" variables here are defined in the man-page..
CODE NORMAL HEADER
%C pcpu %CPU
%G group GROUP
%P ppid PPID
%U user USER
%a args COMMAND
%c comm COMMAND
%g rgroup RGROUP
%n nice NI
%p pid PID
%r pgid PGID
%t etime ELAPSED
%u ruser RUSER
%x time TIME
%y tty TTY
%z vsz VSZ

There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process [microsoft.com]. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

Cryptic???? Tell me one option that is cryptic??.. and... a total of 6 things you can output for a process... that is limiting the usefulness of the command...
And about that the list depends on the platform... Of course, it has too... They are different platform with different types of information for the processes... The POSIX standard defines a number of "must have" that should be platform independent... And options are not, usually, removed or renamed between versions, like Microsoft does between each version...

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format".

-f does full-format listing. This option can be combined with many other UNIX-style
options to add additional columns. It also causes the command arguments to be
printed. When used with -L, the NLWP (number of threads) and LWP (thread ID)
columns will be added. See the c option, the format keyword args, and the format
keyword comm.

If you use it you know what it means... It's the same in windows... I would say having to start with $_. is more cryptic...

Also something that is very powerful in a bash shell is the possibility to use regexps for basically all commands.... like: (Yes i know i can specify the process, but to not confuse the windows-user you are i'm clarifying that i just use the ps output here to display the regexp functionality.)

$ ps |grep "bash$"
4629 pts/0 00:00:00 bash

$ ls
10000
10001
12001
13001
14001
15001
16001
$ ls 1[034]*1
10001
13001
14001

Everythi

Re:No longer a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you don't like the truth doesn't make it FUD.

When "Linux" users have problems with sound in a distro they get these responses:
1) Works for me
2) You're doing it wrong (but no hints on how to do it right)
3) You have the source code, go fix it yourself.
4) Try stuff on this multi-page article, it may or may not help you. It might not even be relevant...
5) Try a different distro (there are 1000 of them, yeah maybe one might just work. Till an update 6 months later breaks stuff, then you start all over again ).
And this happens way too often.

With Windows, the "desktop users" hardly have problems unless they buy some stupid Creative Labs crap.

The Desktop Linux situation has been so bad that it's almost as if the Desktop Linux developers are actually secretly sabotaging "Desktop Linux". Just look at PulseAudio (and the other stupid audio crap), stupid GUI changes for no good reason.

Yes I know Windows is also doing stupid GUI changes too. Whenever they screw up, it's actually an opportunity to gain market share. But the "Desktop Linux" bunch will never get it right if they're all still stuck in denial, or have their heads stuck up their butts.

Lastly, don't take my word for it that Desktop Linux sucks.
1) Go ask Miguel de Icaza: http://www.itwriting.com/blog/4925-miguel-de-icaza-talks-about-windows-8-and-the-failure-of-linux-on-the-desktop.html
2) Look at the market share of OS X.
3) Look at the market share of Android.
4) Look at the market share of "Server Linux". Guess how many linux servers there are in the world. The RAID, SCSI, NIC hardware and drivers are definitely working a lot better than the "desktop stuff".

So the blame for the failures of Desktop Linux lies mainly on the people who make and produce it.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[DarwinSurvivor]

Ok, for your next trick try it with a machine that wasn't specifically built for windows 7.

Re:No longer a monopoly

[DarwinSurvivor]

Funny, any time me or anyone else I know has had problems getting sound/whatever working there have always been VERY helpful people guiding us through troubleshooting and configuration tests. Hell, my friend even had someone compile and upload a custom soundcard driver for him.

Next time you need help, try not *demanding* a fix and feeling entitled to the lone-attention of everyone in the forum and you'll find they are much more helpful.

Funding for ReactOS and WINE.

[Anonymous Coward]

I realy prefer a good Norton Desktop front-end on my Win32 and Win64 programs.

Looks and feels better, witrh more emphasis on running MY PROGRAMS in MY CONTEXT and not anyone else's.

I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[The Living Fractal]

The difference between OS and Browser is fast shrinking. Example: WebOS.
I'm glad Microsoft is taking a stand. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Windows or IE, least of all Microsoft.
And last I checked, the competition isn't exactly hurting...

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Microlith]

They aren't hurting, but we've had some 10 years during which MS was under the watchful eye of the DoJ. I expect that had they not been under such "surveillance" then the last 10 years, and the current state of the industry, would be very different.

Microsoft is retreating to patent suits, as they noted in 1998, to attack Linux now so we're not remotely safe from future anti-competitive acts.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, plenty of people are forced to use Windows and IE, with the penalty for failure to do so being loss of job. Specifically: all real estate agents in Georgia (USA) can only access their MLS system using a crappy piece of software called rexplorer which only runs as an IE plugin. No it will not run in wine either.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[starfishsystems]

No, most of the industry was outright eliminated by Microsoft's past practices. The competition today, to the extent that the industry has recovered, is a paltry fraction of what it used to be, and you'll notice that it only exists in segments where Microsoft didn't successfully get a lock-in through antitrust practices.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

Bullshit to all 3 points.

The OS is a kernel plus core system libraries. It has ZERO relationship to how the output is displayed. Which is why I not only should be able to run KDE and AfterStep under Windows, I can.

What I CANNOT do is run Internet Explorer on Linux. So what if it's compiled for another OS and I don't have the source? I don't have the source for Solaris-x86 Oracle but I CAN run that under Linux (different OS and no source) just fine. Have been able to for years.

Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it. So, yes, if you use Windows, you MUST use IE. You have no choice. And must you use Windows? Well, yes. Many web applications aren't written to international standards, they're written to Microsoft-proprietary functionality within IE. This WILL worsen, with this news about IE and Windows 8, just as it worsened considerably after Microsoft violated the Windows 95 injunction by releasing the bundled IE as Windows 98.

The competition is hurting something chronic. IE has rising usage figures. Firefox is starting to slide. Opera is sliding badly. Chrome may run foul of the Apple vs Google battle-to-the-death. (And one of them WILL die in it, if they don't back off.) Linux has never been fairly or reasonably offered as a desktop choice by anyone other than the OLPC group - and even they are now getting into bed with Microsoft.

Microsoft is a devout monopolist and it WILL kill anything that threatens that monopoly, no matter how savage or ugly they have to get to do so.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it. So, yes, if you use Windows, you MUST use IE.

Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are shared with Internet Explorer.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[pspahn]

To use RE/Xplorer, you must upgrade to Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0. RE/Xplorer 2.1.1 requires Internet Explorer 6.0 in order to deliver cutting-edge functionality as well as enhanced performance and security.

How charming.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Lanteran]

You say that as if a real estate job is worth using internet explorer.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

What part of "it uses IE components" fails to make it IE?

The part where it's using components that are also used by IE (like MSHTML, which is obviously not Internet Explorer)...duh. Photoshop uses Qt components, that doesn't mean Photoshop is Qt, pretty obvious huh.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are Internet Explorer.

FTFY

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[drinkypoo]

What I CANNOT do is run Internet Explorer on Linux.

Try harder. 5, 6, and 7 (at least) will all work using Wine.

Invalid rant is invalid.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are Internet Explorer.

FTFY

FTFY doesn't work when you're wrong, to illustrate why you're wrong: If you re-wrote internet explorer to use the webkit rendering engine instead of trident then Desktop, Control Panel, etc... would still have a dependency on trident and wouldn't magically use webkit for the very simple reason that they are not dependent on Internet Explorer, they are dependent on shared components that are themselves NOT internet explorer.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[theshowmecanuck]

Try harder. 5, 6, and 7 (at least) will all work using Wine.

Trying to get a Windows app to jump through a ragged hoop is not a very good example. If you can leave Wine out of your equation, then your point might have meaning.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[drsmithy]

Trying to get a Windows app to jump through a ragged hoop is not a very good example. If you can leave Wine out of your equation, then your point might have meaning.

Given the benchmark was:

I don't have the source for Solaris-x86 Oracle but I CAN run that under Linux (different OS and no source) just fine. Have been able to for years.

Which is clearly going to require some sort of API or ABI translation layer, I'd say the example of IE under WINE is both reasonable, and appropriate.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Billly Gates]

No it will be muuuch better. Many intranet migrations from IE 6 to IE 8 have the surprise benefit of running on Chrome and even an IPad as long as activex is not heavily utilized. Why? IE 8 supports more standards. IE 10 as much as you want to light it on fire and burn it is a good browser on par with opera and just behond Chrome. Seriously it is a HUGE improvement! Standard html 5 and ajax will make intranet portals to an open standard. Less tie in. MS is opening up and woth IE 6 dead we can have better lives in I.T.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

No it isn't. The Intel Binary Compatibility Standard unifies all of that.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Which is why I not only should be able to run KDE and AfterStep under Windows, I can."

Care to provide a link (or other evidence) to being able to run KDE under windows?, That doesn't sound very likely. (not that i doubt it 100% but that seems to be one of those "WTF?! you can do that??" moments)

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet they use parts of their webserver and +Indexes (or whatever it is called in MS stuff) to pipe the directory information to IE rendering.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[wvmarle]

In how far has this surveillance helped Firefox and other browsers to gain foothold over IE? Over the years IE has always been the default browser on Windows installs. Yet FF is doing quite well now.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying that everything using webkit is safari. It makes no sense. The Windows Control panel is not IE if it uses the same rendering technology. Even if it was IE that does not make the user anymore locked in to Windows than ha already is -- Making the renderer exchangable helps no.one but would create inconsistencies and complexity.

Also, "IE has rising usage figures"? Looking at the collection of statistics* on Wikipedia, 6 out of 6 sources disagree with you. Care to cite your source?

*) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[BenoitRen]

Those components that are shared with Internet Explorer are the IE core. It's part of it. They just jammed it into the system and made everything depend on it.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[gbjbaanb]

maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.

for example, in Windows Explorer, the address bar history is the same as IEs. If you want to prevent Explorer from keeping history of folders you've typed in there, you can - by turning off IEs history option.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

Just like WebKit on OSX which is depended upon by Mail, Dashboard, etc...

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.

So? That works in the same way as WebKit works in OSX, you can't just remove it and expect it to work, it has core functionality that OS applications have come to depend upon. What's the problem with this sort of a situation anyway? If you have some reason that you really don't want the IE libraries then you don't want Explorer either so you just replace the shell.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Sharing of components is good programming, it reduces clutter and bloat.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

We absolutely must stop packaging KDE with Konqueror. I cannot believe they make you use this useful piece of software for browsing files and give you the option to install a browser of your choice. I also can't believe Safari and Finder share system DLLs. This is a disgrace.

Sure you can replace Konqueror easier than explorer... in any OS you can replace the entire shell with whatever you like.

I don't see the problem here. Code sharing is good. A good file browser is good. A standard is good (especially because it is extensible). A system component that is automatically patched is good.

I never use IE to browse the Internet but I love Windows Explorer for browsing files. If Microsoft does create a clean disconnect of all pieces of explorer there will now be 2 options. 1 - default explorer that works 2 - something else that is interesting but has bugs because everyone else uses and tests with #1. No thanks. If you want customization use Linux or replace your shell. It's fun to do but just not practical. I wouldn't replace IE just like I wouldn't replace Konqueror because I like things to run smoothly... I don't have time to fiddle.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[elrous0]

I have to occasionally use a web app that won't work with the latest version of Firefox. The reason is because the shitty programmer that wrote it has it do a version check on the browser. If the version is higher than it recognizes, it dies. Since the app is never upgraded, it stays perpetually locked in the past. I have to keep an old version of IE installed just to access it. Wish I could get 5 minutes alone with the programmer responsible for that turd of an idea.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[AdamJS]

I believe he meant, to run natively. Not through an intermediary layer like Wine.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[itsdapead]

The OS is a kernel plus core system libraries. It has ZERO relationship to how the output is displayed. Which is why I not only should be able to run KDE and AfterStep under Windows, I can.

In that case, feel free to suggest a suitable name, other than "Operating System", for products such as Windows, OS X or Ubuntu which comprise an awful lot more than a kernel plus core system libraries, and cover everything from email to basic photo editing. Back in the 90s you might be able to argue that a web browser wasn't part of the OS, but these days every credible platform needs, not only a web browser, but libraries for HTTP, HTML/XML DOM, CSS etc. Apple does it, Android does it, and most Linux distributions (as opposed to Linux itself) anoint particular browsers and HTML/XML libraries.

Yes, Microsoft need "restraining" and, to a certain extent, their near-monopoly status is justification for forcing them to play by different rules - but saying that they can't have an HTML subsystem in their OS may have sounded credible in the 1990s but is ridiculous in the current environment. A better approach is to press for standards compliance, to ensure that IE only websites are unacceptable.

The problem is that Microsoft have a dominant market position in OS and Office software, so any product they "bundle" will tend to prevail. I'd say the situation with Office is now far worse than with Windows - I can live without Windows quite happily, but I have to be able to reliably open Office docs with far greater re4liability and fidelity than OO can manage.

Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it.

So what? If I have a FOSS application that uses Webkit there's no guarantee that an end-user can easily convert it to use Gecko (unless the authors have made the commercially unjustifiable effort to support both), or any particular reason that I should want to.

The competition is hurting something chronic. IE has rising usage figures. Firefox is starting to slide. Opera is sliding badly.

I don't recall Opera ever being a force to be reckoned with on the desktop, but they did have a nice niche on mobile devices: I'm guessing that its Safari and the Android browser that are eating their lunch.

Ironically, though, part of the issue is that Chrome and Firefox were successful and forced Microsoft, get their act together and improve both the UI and standards compliance of their browser. Later IEs are much nicer to use and (though not perfect) miles better on standards compliance. The major headache for web designers today is not getting their sites to work on IE8/9 and Firefox/Webkit but the fact that the accursed IE6 still isn't dead.

The positive news, however, is that its now much harder for MS to get away with ignoring standards, because people want to be able to access the web from their iDevices, Androids and Macs - all of which use variants on Webkit which (though surely not perfect) is a rather better implementation of the web standards than IE ever was. Neither Microsoft or current web designers can afford to ignore web standards. Unless Windows Mobile 7 succeeds beyond expectation, Webkit-based browsers will account for a large slice of web usage. There's still a problem in "corporate" systems but, even there, the upside of "consumerization" will be PHBs demanding access from their iPads.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[poetmatt]

there's a difference - you can use photoshop without QT, you can't use windows without trident.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[asdf7890]

What I CANNOT do is run Internet Explorer on Linux.

Try harder. 5, 6, and 7 (at least) will all work using Wine.

Invalid rant is invalid.

Try harder. I'm told 8 can be made to work, but 9 can't reliably as yet. And I expect it would take a while after release to get 10 going that way if it ever does.IE5/6/7 is not adequate testing to say your code works well with IE when many are using 8 or 9. Also, running IE away from Windows is probably explicitly against the license agreement in some way/shape/form (OK so click through licenses may be worth little more then their weight in my excrement, but I for one would not be willing to waste time arguing that point in order to test my stuff on MS's browser).

Your counter-rant is invalid.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[scot4875]

Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it.

This whining makes about as much sense as whining that *everything* uses mscorlib, or comctl32. mshtml is just a useful presentation layer library; there's no reason that it shouldn't be used wherever an application is doing, you know, presentation-type stuff.

--Jeremy

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[keith_nt4]

Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it. So, yes, if you use Windows, you MUST use IE. You have no choice. And must you use Windows? Well, yes. Many web applications aren't written to international standards, they're written to Microsoft-proprietary functionality within IE. This WILL worsen, with this news about IE and Windows 8, just as it worsened considerably after Microsoft violated the Windows 95 injunction by releasing the bundled IE as Windows 98.

I guess you aren't aware but this is all true of Vista and 7. And yet other browsers and OSes exist some how. Just because the Control Panel window is an IE-based window doesn't mean you have to use it to check your email. It's just a window rendered with a web browser. Not that big a deal.

The competition is hurting something chronic. IE has rising usage figures. Firefox is starting to slide. Opera is sliding badly. Chrome may run foul of the Apple vs Google battle-to-the-death. (And one of them WILL die in it, if they don't back off.) Linux has never been fairly or reasonably offered as a desktop choice by anyone other than the OLPC group - and even they are now getting into bed with Microsoft.

Firefox is sliding because of project management (as far as I can tell). Opera has had fairly consistent market share for 10+ years, admirable on some level. I don't think that has anything to do with MS either. The reason I have never gotten into it is the whole built in web server thing. That seems like a really, really bad idea some how. Neither of these things have anything to do with MS. Chrome seems to be doing fine and still improving, I don't see any reason to worry about it. For that matter Safari still comes bundled with all those iTunes installs.

Point is IE doesn't seem that much of a threat to existing browsing technology, it will lose or gain market share based on quality as much as anything.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[internerdj]

"Microsoft is a devout monopolist and it WILL kill anything that threatens that monopoly, no matter how savage or ugly they have to get to do so." I expect this out of most every large corporation that doesn't have some sort of partial or total collusion with their peer competitors. In fact there are plenty of FOSS project members that act like this as well (although not as common). This is one reason we have a government to place limits on the "free" market.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG.. Linux is totally taking over the Desktop..

Maybe they're suing because Linux is actually infringing? After all the Open source world is built upon making crappy copies of existing successful proprietary products. See Linux.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[spitzak]

Why is this argument actually being presented? It is stupid beyond belief!

So "using a component of IE" makes any program "IE"? Every single program that uses this rendering engine provided by Microsoft is IE? The program I can write right now that calls this rendering engine is therefore IE? Oh my god, I seem to have violated Microsoft's trademark and I can't get out of it, because my program "is IE" by your definition!

You can and should be able to remove the blue E from the desktop. Saying that "some of the code it uses remains so therefore it can't be removed" would mean you can't remove *anything* from the desktop, since they all call strlen() and other stuff that will still remain!

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

Will this do?

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

KDE isn't packaged with Konqueror. Konqueror is an independent package and there's no requirement to install it.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

In the Windows 95 days, if I wanted to use Windows' winsock, I could do so. I could also replace it with Trumpet's. If I wanted to use Windows memory manager, I could do so, or I could replace it with EMM386. I don't think you could seriously get away with saying a memory manager wasn't shared code, but they still had it so that you could swap it out and insert something that did the same job from someone else.

In the modern Unix (including OS/X and OLPC) world, I can still do this. What I can't do is replace IE's rendering engine.

Explain how this is so amazingly superior, given they didn't originally have this kind of issue with ANY core component, no matter how shared, and that no competing system has this problem today.

You and the other MS schills say I'm whining, but you haven't explained a damn thing. You lot keep avoiding the fact that these components HAVE been interchangeable in Windows in the past AND are interchangeable in other systems today. Your pointing to mscorlib and comctl32 are laughable because these ARE replaceable with rival DLLs, but still IE's rendering engine IS NOT.

Don't complain, EXPLAIN.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[jd]

You say "this is all true of Vista and 7", but then have to come up with convoluted reasons as to why IE's marketshare is going up despite failing ACID and why other browsers' shares are going down. Isn't it easier (and therefore the more correct) to say that bundling had this identical effect before and so bundling will have this effect again?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I don't know what it is when Microsoft does the same thing and you expect different results, but lunacy springs to mind.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

there's a difference - you can use photoshop without QT, you can't use windows without trident.

Ok so how do i run photoshop elements with no windowing library? You know you can't use Dashboard or Mail in OSX without webkit either, that doesn't mean Dashboard and Mail are webkit, they just use webkit libraries.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[gbjbaanb]

so, no-one claims that you cannot replace Safari in OSX, but on Windows they do say that you *need* IE10 installed in order to use the OS.

That's the difference, MS using the underlying component to push their web browser (and therefore the default Bing and MS advert engine) to the users.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[msoftsucks]

You are totally clueless. Half of all medical sites that doctors must use, force them to use IE. Even the US govt web sites (such as Medicare and Medicaid) require IE. When I asked one of the technical support people for a e-prescription web site, why they don't support any other browser, he told me that Microsoft pays them a ton of money to keep the site IE accessible only. I've been trying to promote Firefox use in doctors offices but most of these sites refuse to work properly with IETAB. Trying to get doctors and their staff to use IE just for these sites and Firefox for the rest is an excercise in futility. Microsoft is playing dirty tricks and now that the DOJ monitoring is over, we are going to lose any independent gains we have made over the last 10 years.

Re:I applaud Microsoft their tenacity.

[exomondo]

so, no-one claims that you cannot replace Safari in OSX, but on Windows they do say that you *need* IE10 installed in order to use the OS.

That's the difference, MS using the underlying component to push their web browser (and therefore the default Bing and MS advert engine) to the users.

They don't use the underlying component to push their web browser because the component they use the rendering engine, which is not the web browser, it is no different from Apple using webkit in their operating system. You can remove IE, as in not see it as an installed program, but if just knowing it is there will cause you to seek out the .exe file and use it as your browser anyway then maybe you just like IE as a browser.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

With Firefox. And seriously, any modern OS should have a browser installed by default, if only to download your favorite browser. Hell, Google wants to have an OS that is only the browser!

I think the Ballmer jizz you've been guzzling has rotted your brain - I don't recall any part of Linux REQUIRING Firefox in order to work. This is an OS-level feature (the Metro UI) that requires a particular browser be installed to operate...

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

You can uninstall Firefox from Linux. Try again.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd +1 you if I had mod points.

Re:And Linux does too

[Blackfoot17]

The difference is in Linux you can uninstall Firefox and It's not required for some of the new toys to work. And all modern OSes Do include a web browser

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't see that one coming

That's all I have to do?

[DarkLordofLogic]

This is good news. It means all I have to do to avoid those crappy Metro apps is delete the IE10 registry keys. Two birds with one stone, baby.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Microlith]

Unless you're on ARM, in which case you won't be able to use anything but Metro apps.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[tepples]

If you're on an ARM tablet, why are you using Windows in the first place when you could be using Android?

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

In which case you should have installed Linux.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or desktop apps that were compiled for ARM?

Since when was desktop mode dropped for ARM? Granted, they don't have a user-mode emulator, which means that until somebody writes one or there's a massive recompilation movement for entrenched Windows desktop apps, 90% of ARM compatible apps will use WinRT/Metro. That does not mean Microsoft is requiring ARM users to use Metro. Windows 8 on ARM will ship with the full desktop.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Microlith]

Because you may end up with an ARM tablet somehow. Or maybe they'll move in that direction with consumer hardware.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Microlith]

Microsoft is explicitly not supporting Win32 on ARM. For Windows 8 on ARM the only available APIs will be WinRT and Metro.

Windows 8 on ARM will ship with the full desktop.

Again, minus Win32 support. Disable IE10, your system will break. Never mind the intensely anti-competitive slant of barring the distribution of WinRT/Metro applications except by Microsoft's store.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Microlith]

Good luck doing so on an ARM device. It sounds easy, but in reality it's a bitch due to the complete lack of all the plug and play support available now on x86 platforms.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Gadget_Guy]

Microsoft is explicitly not supporting Win32 on ARM.

That is just what was misreported when it became known that x86 applications will not be supported on the ARM version of the OS. Win32 is still powering the Windows 8.

It would be a major rewrite to the operating system to remove such a critical part of the system. It would take longer to code than the changes they made to Vista. Microsoft would definitely NOT go down that path again, and why should they anyway? Windows has been ported to other architectures before, so the API has definitely been coded to work on non-Intel chips.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[tepples]

Are you predicting that x86 laptop PCs will disappear along with Android tablets like the Nook Color and Eee Pad Transformer? If so, could you clarify how each will happen?

Re:That's all I have to do?

[zoloto]

Who the fuck wants to use Adroid? It's not exactly the pinnacle of great software.

Re:That's all I have to do?

[Tomato42]

Why are you using Android in the first place when you could be using a real Linux distro?

What about iOS?

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Wouldn't the Apple stuff be subject to something similar? Safari comes bundled too ...

Re:What about iOS?

[exomondo]

Wouldn't the Apple stuff be subject to something similar? Safari comes bundled too ...

They do have significant market power, but whether that's enough to subject them to anti-trust laws is debatable. In the end it shouldn't really matter because these days you expect a web browser to be bundled with pretty much any consumer-oriented operating system and if you don't want to use that then you just install something else.

Re:What about iOS?

[nurb432]

Bundled yes, integrated as part of the core system, no.

Re:What about iOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not?

It's integrated as part of the core system in iOS. There's no method for the end user to replace the browser, and even on a jailbroken device, removing the browser will result in a large pile of apps that don't work. Win8 is moving to a similiar App eco-system, so it makes sense that they have a core set of UI widgets, and like it or not, in today's world, the web browser is a common UI widget.

You don't like it, don't use the OS. Problem solved. Why does some government agency need to get involved?

Re:What about iOS?

[bunratty]

Apple does not have a monopoly position. Microsoft was found guilty of having a monopoly in the OS market and using that power to unfairly compete in other markets, such as web browsers. It's not about bundling at all, except that is the specific way Microsoft abused its monopoly.

Re:What about iOS?

[bmuon]

It is part of the core system. There are 3 ways you can use Mobile Safari: opening it, using an installed web app and through WebViews inside other apps. All of them are WebKit and to a certain level Mobile Safari. And Apple explicitly forbids the publication of browsers that don't use WebKit or that use another JavaScript runtime. That's why there's even talk about Firefox for jailbroken iOS devices.

Re:What about iOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does not have a monopoly position. Microsoft was found guilty of having a monopoly in the OS market and using that power to unfairly compete in other markets, such as web browsers. It's not about bundling at all, except that is the specific way Microsoft abused its monopoly.

Apple has more of a monopoly market in the Tablet space than Microsoft now has in the Computer space, the cross over between Computer and tablet is getting closer and closer to being one and the same, especially with Windows 8,
The Difference is Apple has managed to still get treated like the Underdog even as they dominate markets, they remain the praised child even as they bully everyone around them as much or MORE than Microsoft ever did.

Because Windows 8 is going to be for the Computer space and The tablet space, I really don't care if it is integrated, Consumers, and Business's have so many options now, they can Apple Computers with OSX and still have MS Office, and Exchange, they can RUN linux and used cloud tools, and Chrome OS is trying to get off the ground, Enterprise and the Consumer is not locked to Microsoft and the Beige box that was a PC like it was 5 and 10 years ago.

Now I don't like IE much, but I keep it installed as it has it's uses, as long as I can Install FireFox and Opera I would have no issues with Windows 8, (well besides Metro man I just can't get used to it no matter how hard I try)

Re:What about iOS?

[hedwards]

Monopoly position isn't necessary to get sued for antitrust violations. I'm not sure in this case that tying IE to the computer isn't the same antitrust violation that it was back in the 90s. There is more competition now than there was then, so MS might get away with it, but it's questionable as to whether it's really any less illegal than it was back then.

Also having a monopoly isn't necessarily grounds for being sued either. Right now Amazon is more or less a vertically integrated monopoly in books, they publish, print and distribute books, basically everything except write them. At this stage, I wouldn't expect them to be sued for antitrust violations as they're largely disruptive and increasing the value that consumers can expect for their money.

Re:What about iOS?

[bunratty]

Having a monopoly is fine. Abusing the monopoly to unfairly compete is not. Is Apple abusing a monopoly? If so, call the FTC.

Re:What about iOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Found guilty of having a monopoly?

No, they were found guilty of not spending enough money on lobbying, so they were forced to remedy that by doing what? Oh yeah, directing money to PR firms and into politician's vacation funds.

That's all we got out of that farce of a trial, and no we did not benefit.

Re:What about iOS?

[SpryGuy]

Chrom OS anyone?

Re:What about iOS?

[BradleyUffner]

Having a monopoly is fine. Abusing the monopoly to unfairly compete is not. Is Apple abusing a monopoly? If so, call the FTC.

Microsoft can't be abusing a monopoly that it no longer has.

Re:What about iOS?

[Bert64]

Tablets are a market that prior to Apple taking over, were totally irrelevant...

And Apple tablets have _always_ had an integrated browser, whereas the first versions of windows (and all versions of dos) shipped without a browser and it was commonplace for users to download a third party browser.

Plus the Apple browser follows published standards, and the source code for the rendering engine is open to everyone. MS on the other hand intentionally changed things to lock people in to their browser.
There is no reason why an Android tablet using webkit cannot render sites exactly the same as an iPad...

In short..

MS took away a choice people used to have, Apple never gave people a choice from the start.

MS try to lock people in to their browser and their platform, Apple make you use their browser when using their platform but there's nothing to stop you using a compatible browser (even the same rendering engine) on a competing platform.

Re:What about iOS?

[Bert64]

There's less competition now... In the early 90s before MS integrated IE, Apple had a larger desktop share, unix workstations were still fairly common in universities and larger businesses and novell still common in smaller ones, commodore/atari were still around too especially in europe and netscape was the dominant web browser.

Re:What about iOS?

[IRWolfie-]

Microsoft has a near total monopoly (90%+) on the desktop and can leverage this to increase its browser usage.

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

There is nothing in Linux which requires Firefox. Firefox is pre-installed, but only on specific distros. Other distros include other browsers, or no browser at all. (You don't need one - wget is perfectly good.)

This is different than with IE and Windows. If you remove IE, components totally unrelated to web browsing or the Internet WILL fail, because the libraries are crafted to include totally irrelevant code that is critical for other components. Because Microsoft do not publish the specs for these libraries, crafting replacements that ONLY have the bits needed for the rest of the system to function is almost impossible. Not completely impossible, just very very very hard.

There simply isn't any comparison between willful sabotage of the user and a simple pre-install, even if your claim that Firefox was pre-installed with Linux was correct.

It's a different world now...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I think it's unfortunate for MS to go back to it's old ways, and those were some dark days back then with a lot of casualties, I think the browser and platform world has changed so dramatically that I don't think MS's old methods will be so effective. Any failing of Firefox going forward will be due to it's own development community and not MS. Chrome as well, though I think it follows a fairly good model now.

The browser users are far more aware now... Not educated, but at least are aware of Firefox like it's a household name... And Chrome has recogniiton to a lesser extent, at least to those who spend any significant amount of time online.

On the platform front, it's too bad a good consumer Linux implementation still hasn't been brought to the market, and unfortunately Apple's pricing for systems forces a large majority of buyers to to the commodity PC market. Solve those issues, and the browser won't the the only thing MS will lose control of.

Incredibly Low Burden of Proof

[SJrX]

Most things allow you to keep your settings while removing the rest of the application. There is a big difference between left over Registry entries not being removed, and merely hiding IE. While I suspect they are closer to the hiding IE side of things, I think the proof they offer is silly.

Re:Incredibly Low Burden of Proof

[jbov]

I thought the exact same thing while reading TFA. I'd mod +1 you if I had any. Registry entries and files located in the %appdata% folders should be sufficient for retaining settings.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, uninstall Safari from OS X

Re:And Linux does too

[NoobixCube]

I'll refrain from modrating since there's no "-1 spend five minutes on Google then come back and apologise for what an idiot you've been; following this, immediately re-evaluate every 'argument' you've been in, and figure out if you were right, or just a tool. Apologise to all those with the misfortune of meeting you".

Is Metro the new ActiveX?

[GeneralTurgidson]

Only bad things happen when Microsoft integrates stuff into Windows.

Re:Is Metro the new ActiveX?

[marcosdumay]

I quita liked it when they integrateed an IP stack...

But, anyway, integrating IE seems completely irrelevant nowadays. It looks more like "just another (boring) GUI toolkit", and less like "stuff people will use".

Re:Is Metro the new ActiveX?

[Tom]

I know the end-user probably doesn't care, but there's quite a difference there.

An IP stack is a purely internal beast. It's a protocol, data exchange, etc.

I'm sure nobody would complain if MS had, say, added a HTML or DOM library to the OS. But a browser is an application, no matter how desperately you try to muddy the waters by "integrating" it with the OS.

But really, 10 years later, do we really have to revisit this point again and again? Even after political intervention, they were still/b found guilty.

You must be kidding

[nmb3000]

From T (useless) FA:

For example, before we turned off IE 10, we changed the default privacy setting from allowing some cookies to completely blocking all cookies. We then turned the browser off, rebooted, and IE 10 appeared to have completely disappeared from the PC. But when we went back into the settings, turned IE 10 back on, and rebooted again, the browser was back -- but with our customized settings, not the default. That would appear to indicate that Microsoft doesn’t really remove the browser entirely, but rather just hides it – with customized settings and all.

OMFG! A conspiracy unmasked! User settings aren't deleted!

So, because IE doesn't delete your settings it isn't being removed? By this same stupid logic we can determine that almost no modern software is ever actually removed.

I'm quite astounded with the depth of these morons' investigation.

Re:You must be kidding

[Dracos]

Perhaps, but any mortal software would need to be reinstalled. Or did T(u)FA leave that part out?

Re:You must be kidding

[shutdown -p now]

IE is a "Windows component", and the [un]installation procedure for these is different than the regular Windows Installer / MSI stuff, for whatever reason.

Re:You must be kidding

[EdIII]

Mortal software?

I think somebody has been watching Tron.

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

-- but with our customized settings, not the default. That would appear to indicate that Microsoft doesn’t really remove the browser entirely, but rather just hides it – with customized settings and all.

We've had multi-user operating systems on Windows home computers for what, 10 years, and this idiot still does not understand the distinction between program and user data.

Re:You must be kidding

[Baloroth]

MS has (for quite a while, starting in Vista I think) put the install packages for a lot of software and Windows features into every installed copy of Windows. So turning features off doesn't remove them from the system, it just removes the installed components. A quick check shows this includes IE9 on 7. So turning it off in the Windows features (like they do in TFA) doesn't remove it entirely from the system (you can always reinstall it without a disk), although it does "uninstall" it I believe. This is rather convenient (helps greatly with their install process too.) So what if you can't remove every las trace of it from 8? You can uninstall it for all practical purposes.

Also, it may be possible to completely remove it, TFA just says MS hasn't said how yet. So, yeah, TFA is useless and spreading FUD, AFAICT.

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how it works on Windows, but I've always came to understand that an appliction's settings ought to be separate from the application.

Today, for instance, I've installed Opera on my newly configured system to test a problem in a system on another browser:

$ sudo pacman -Sy opera

When I opened it, it opened three sites of a session I was using on another system months ago. Why? Because I have my /home separeted and I push it around whenever I make changes to the OS. So I had a ~/.opera folder containing all these settings and the session.

That's just how it's supposd to be, frankly.

(Sure glad I wasn't browsing porn last time, though)

Re:You must be kidding

[drinkypoo]

IE is a "Windows component", and the [un]installation procedure for these is different than the regular Windows Installer / MSI stuff, for whatever reason.

It goes way back to what, Windows 95 at least, but I'm thinking Windows 3. I don't have a Win31 VM handy any more or I'd go check.

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get remove --purge foo does the trick, usually, along with removing dotfiles from ~ and ~/.config/

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

While the investigation may be badly done there is probably truth to it. Does Microsoft remove IE or hide it? If it removed it anything dependent on it shouldn't work as the executable code won't be there.

Re:You must be kidding

[drsmithy]

We've had multi-user operating systems on Windows home computers for what, 10 years, and this idiot still does not understand the distinction between program and user data.

From the perspective of simple data separation, it's more like 15 years.

Re:You must be kidding

[game kid]

I consider the retained settings a good thing: if I want to copy the now-unused settings to a new user or use them for a different browser, and the settings are reasonably easy to find, I can move or import the settings and feel more-or-less at home. If I want to reinstall IE (maybe I made an oopsie, or maybe it wasn't the cause of some nagging hideous error I hoped to fix by nuking a browser), then I install as I first did and *poof* at home with the ol' settings again.

Settings are kind of harmless—the real problem, if any, is the program and libraries themselves.

Re:You must be kidding

[RubberChainsaw]

Being able to remove every last trace of an unused part of windows would be a great boon. I am currently rocking a 64GB SSD drive with windows 7. 18GB of that is taken up by the Windows directory.

If I could cut that down by half, that'd be enough room for 2-3 extra games. As it is, I am constantly uninstalling and reinstalling to make use of my SSD for fast loading.

Since I make use of, well, basically none of the features like tablet support, speech recognition, gadgets, or.. IE, it'd be nice if I could free up some extra space by completely wiping them off the drive. Or, at least put those install files on to my data hard disk.

Re:You must be kidding

[dunkelfalke]

Windows 98. While IE was semi-integrated into Windows 95 OSR3 you could uninstall it completely. Well, and you could also remove IE from Windows 98 if you substitute a few files from Windows 95.

Windows 3.x never had a browser included. It did not have a built in TCP/IP stack FFS.

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

On a pre-release version no less - shock horror!

Re:You must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

They're right! Punish those users for removing IE 10 by delete all of those registry keys... you know the ones that are shared with other applications... such as the default proxy settings.

Then the system will be cleansed from that abomination.

Wait a minute... when you or I turn it back on (because someone clueless removed it by accident) we'll need to reconfigure all of these settings. Nevermind!

Re:You must be kidding

[drinkypoo]

Windows 3.x never had a browser included. It did not have a built in TCP/IP stack FFS.

I'm not talking about the browser, I'm talking about Add/Remove Windows components.

Microsoft DID give away a free TCP stack for Windows 3.1, which works OK. It was not bundled with windows. It is maybe half as fast as TGV's stack was, but that will do for most purposes today.

Re:You must be kidding

[dunkelfalke]

Sorry dude, was a misunderstanding.

Re:You must be kidding

[Bert64]

The point was that its hidden, not uninstalled at all... The comment about customised settings only serves to detract from that point.

As for leaving settings, this is a particular annoyance of mine even on linux to a lesser extent... If i remove a program, i want the option to remove all its settings too, rather than the current status quo which generally leaves settings incase you ever want to reinstall the program.

On windows this is a huge pain, and makes it even more painful to experiment with different programs...

On linux its usually not quite so bad, most package managers have an option to purge system wide config files and user specific configs are generally held in their own dir within $HOME.

Browser vs. Rendering Libraries

[msobkow]

I understand the idea of shared rendering libraries similar to WebKit or Gecko. While the knee jerk reaction is that they're locking out other browsers, I see the need to provide core libraries. Being HTML-based, Metro has got to have a rendering library.

As long as they don't force you to use IE for browsing and allow you to continue to install 3rd-party browsers, I have no problem with this any more. All of the vendors partner on whose applications and websites are going to be the defaults that most users won't change. Why shouldn't Microsoft default to their own products while allowing you to install or configure alternatives?

Don't forget -- Mozilla does the same thing by partnering to provide a default search engine.

Re:Browser vs. Rendering Libraries

[shutdown -p now]

Being HTML-based, Metro has got to have a rendering library.

Metro is not HTML-based. Only Metro apps written in JS have to use HTML5 for their UI. Metro apps written in C++ or .NET have their own XAML stack, which is completely different (though it does have a WebView control, which, if you use it, is of course hosted IE).

Re:Browser vs. Rendering Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for everyone, but I wasn't worried about the fact that they bundled a web browser. I was fine with that. What I wasn't ok with was the fact that they actively tried to force their competition out of the market. Telling OEMs that they'll lose their Windows license if they include Netscape (even if the customer specifically requested it!) is not fine with me.

Re:Browser vs. Rendering Libraries

[mjwx]

Don't forget -- Mozilla does the same thing by partnering to provide a default search engine.

Yes, but Mozilla makes it trivial to change and DOES NOT bother you about it every 10 seconds.

Just re-imaged a laptop.
- Opens IE.
- Navigate to a few sites (AVG, Firefox)
- popup frame covers the page asking me to Install the BING bar.
- clicks no
- Clicking no tries to install Bing bar, I stop it.
- Popup is back, INSTALL THE BING BAR
- clicks no,
- Again tries to install the Bing bar, again, I stop it.
- REALLY, INSTALL THE BING BAR. Damn this popup is insistent.
- I'm really tired of this now, FFX has finished downloading so I hit the red X. Low and fucking behold, IE wont close. IE will not close cleanly until I install the Bing bar. Well I'm not playing that game. Open task manager and end process.
- Installed firefox and forgot about IE.
- Uninstalled the Bing Bar installer from Add/Remove programs.

IE is a travesty of popups asking me to do stuff I really dont care about. Chrome and Firefox understand that I dont want to turn on web accelertors, I dont want to pick a god damn search engine, I dont want to turn on and configure safe search, I just want to browse the web, when you first open IE 7 or later, it throws 100 roadblocks between you and that goal in the form of popups the average person couldn't care less about.

Dont get me started about changing the default search engine in IE on Win 7, the option is nowhere in IE.

Re:Browser vs. Rendering Libraries

[Tomato42]

MS download sites are only a bit better, every time I visit them to download Yet Another Critical Security Hotfix it suggests me to install Silverlight, every time. And no, I don't have cookies disabled. MS is all about popups now.

Re:And Linux does too

[quanticle]

Last I checked no window manager on Linux requires Firefox to be installed. However, in Windows 8, Internet Explorer will be required for the "Metro" window manager.

Win8 was bad enough with Metro alone

[Anonymous Coward]

Now users are stuck with an installation of IE, too?

The turd sandwich comes with a side of tumor.

Thanks for making this decision even easier.

Re:And Linux does too

[nurb432]

Umm linux doesn't have a browser. its a kernel.

Besides, you need to read up and see what the difference is between 'integrated' and 'installed'.

Good.

[CannonballHead]

It's stupid to say that Microsoft cannot have a rendering engine on their OS that is required to be there by other parts of the OS.

I am more than welcome, I'm sure (hey look! a Bingy firefox!), to download my own browser of choice and use it. It just won't be used for the parts of the OS that require their own rendering engine. Which makes sense; how can MS make sure that Firefox would render Metro style UI apps correctly? They HAVE to provide something to render. The fact that it's the same engine as renders webpages is, in my opinion, reusing something they already had developed. Makes sense to me.

If they actually forced web browsing use it and didn't let you install Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.... that'd be different.

Re:Good.

[drinkypoo]

Nobody ever said that. Removing internet explorer doesn't remove internet explorer. It just removes iexplore.exe and some other crap not needed to render HTML with a control.

Re:Good.

[10101001 10101001]

It's stupid to say that Microsoft cannot have a rendering engine on their OS that is required to be there by other parts of the OS.

Last I checked, Meteo is supposed to be a HTML5 + Javascript based UI while IE is a lot more than that. What if I genuinely have no interest in allowing Meteo from connecting to the internet in any way? If Meteo is just latching into IE's rendering engine, how much real faith do I have that some time in the future some well crafted Meteo UI won't exploit one or more random non-HTML5/Javascript bugs? More generally, if Meteo used a well defined HTML5 + javascript engine, quite possible the same one IE uses, wouldn't that mean it'd be possible to both (1) port Meteo apps to other platforms rather easily using another engine and (2) allow people to replace that engine with a Gecko or Webkit based engine (since each HTML5 engine has their own advantages and disadvantages)?

I am more than welcome, I'm sure (hey look! a Bingy firefox!), to download my own browser of choice and use it. It just won't be used for the parts of the OS that require their own rendering engine. Which makes sense; how can MS make sure that Firefox would render Metro style UI apps correctly? They HAVE to provide something to render. The fact that it's the same engine as renders webpages is, in my opinion, reusing something they already had developed. Makes sense to me.

There's no guarantee that a well-defined Meteo style UI app will render properly in Meteo. The only way to be sure is to test. If people were to start using a Gecko based back-end for Meteo, developers would just have to test for it too. The issue really isn't why MS chose to use IE's HTML5 engine. The point is that it looks either sloppy to only support IE's HTML5 engine or an intentional act of tie-in. I'd imagine it's more the former without enough consideration of technology outside of MS and any real interest in working with other software. Mozilla has the same issue. Having said that, Mozilla isn't pre-installed on most computers so most people don't have to suffer that lack of consideration; instead people have to go out of their way to use Firefox and/or go out of their way to not use Windows/IE.

If they actually forced web browsing use it and didn't let you install Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.... that'd be different.

No. They'd rather just force OEMs to not install Firefox, Safari, etc. It's too much hassle to go after the end-users. It's a lot easier to go after OEMs and rely upon the inertia of end-users to not move to use whatever you push on them. Having said that, you can't make utter crap or people do eventually start moving; and a flashy marketing campaign from the competition can do wonders, sometimes. Personally, I'm more annoyed with how Microsoft has pushed IE to be such a big target and did such a shitty job protecting IE users from crap. Can you imagine how Meteo might end up turning out?

Re:Good.

[EdIII]

Only problem I have with it is the rendering engine itself should be able to be replaced. MS has always been piss poor on rendering anything correctly. Probably has a lot to do with their attitude, and that is only *very* recently starting to change.

So if the rendering engine is top notch, adheres to standards, cooperative with the global communities, and responsive to needed changes... great. That has not been MS behavior in the past though.

In a way I do take this personally. I have to deal with way too many 3rd party applications that use core parts of the MS OS, that are just outdated and downright crappy. If there was a way to swap out those core pieces with other code, my life would be so much easier.

You have a great point, but ultimately the problem remains..... IE can't render anything for shit. IE9 is getting better, but is still too young. The day MS can actually render something according to standards I won't care that I am using their rendering engine.

P.S - In MS defense... the current IE8 has better performance than Firefox, even while not rendering things correctly. Talk about a major disappointment. Firefox......

Re:Good.

[Dahamma]

Exactly. It's like claiming Google is becoming a monopoly so they must allow uninstalling the Chrome browser from Chrome OS. The browser is becoming the window manager/desktop, big f-ing deal! I have IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on my Windows machine, and it's pretty damn easy to use whichever I want to browse the web.

Re:Good.

[Archangel Michael]

If Metro Apps are rendered in a WEB BROWSER, then shouldn't they adhere to WEB STANDARDS and thus be able to be rendered in any other standard compliant browser?

This is nothing more than IE custom HTML Extensions ... part 2, just as we are finally getting over the last of the websites built on the LAST crappy 1/2 standard issued by Microsoft.

THAT is what this means. And why would anyone develop for that platform given the result of the last time they did that (not to mention things like Silverlight).

No! Microsoft is becoming more and more irrelevant and the smart money won't be on closed standards that run on monolithic platforms.

Re:Good.

[mandelbr0t]

You sound like you hate Windows. Great news! You don't have to run it!

Re:Good.

[rapidreload]

No! Microsoft is becoming more and more irrelevant and the smart money won't be on closed standards that run on monolithic platforms.

People have been saying Microsoft is becoming more and more irrelevant for YEARS. If they're still this powerful after so long, then obviously the slide into irrelevancy is taking too long for anyone to notice, or (more than likely) it's just a lot of hot air and isn't happening.

Plus, if the smart money won't be on closed standards that run on monolithic platforms, then I guess the iPhone/iPad are financial failures. Closed standards don't seem to bother anyone these days except developers. For better or worse.

Re:Good.

[benthurston27]

You misspelled Metro 10 times in your post.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed.

bear in mind that also most retarded users wouldnt be able to download a new browser of their choice without the use of an existing browser.

Does anyone complain about safari being on macs?

But the main point here is
"how can MS make sure that Firefox would render Metro style UI apps correctly?"

Re:Good.

[Pope]

Must be the weather.

Re:Good.

[Tom]

how can MS make sure that Firefox would render Metro style UI apps correctly?

By making them properly standards-compliant. You know, HTML5 isn't exactly a Firefox add-on.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I also don't understand this. Are they preventing users from installing other browsers? No? Then who cares?

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fine if they want to have a rendering engine as a required part of the OS, but it should be done as part of the OS in that case. There's no need to force you to keep IE installed.

Re:Good.

[bonch]

If Metro Apps are rendered in a WEB BROWSER, then shouldn't they adhere to WEB STANDARDS and thus be able to be rendered in any other standard compliant browser?

And if there isn't a standard compliant browser present, then what?

Re:Good.

[10101001 10101001]

Thanks for the effort on the counting and all. That's what I get for skimming over the latest buzzword name for a new product and remembering it wrong then further skimming over the same name ever since. :/

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, Metro apps don't render in HTML5 ONLY... It is also rendered in other languages such as silverlight, .NET, etc...

European Union?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because they can bundle the two in the US doesn't mean they can do it everywhere.

If it were not for Metro

[Billly Gates]

We would have an actually great browser with little lockin. Actually I thank Apple. Chrome to me is turning more proprietary with Dart and other technologies. I think this is good and IE 10 can never be IE 6 due to other browsers and phones and tablets. I.T greatly looks forward to Ie 10 and html 5 compaired to to IE 6 anyday

Re:And Linux does too

[MrHanky]

Wrong. 1) Linux does not come with Firefox. 2) Firefox can be uninstalled under Linux. 3) Linux does not depend on Firefox for anything, not even for downloading your favourite browser. Hell, you wouldn't even want to use a browser to download and install another browser under Linux, you'd just use your package manager to install it.

Why were you talking again?

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

The MetroUI is rendered in part with HTML5. A browser is needed for this. Microsoft makes a browser. It therefore makes sense to tie it in. This isn't brain surgery.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to add "because I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between including a browser by default and making the browser unremovable" to that sentence.

Re:And Linux does too

[arthur.gunn]

rm -rf /Applications/Safari.app
done.

Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Freak]

Their evidence is that if they change a setting from default, then "uninstall" IE, then "reinstall" IE, it keeps the changed setting, it doesn't revert to default.

That is their sole piece of evidence they claim in the article.

That is the best "evidence" they could come up with? I have LOTS of apps that save their settings through an uninstall/reinstall! And those apps are definitely uninstalled.

Does Microsoft actually "uninstall" IE9, 8, or 7, when you disable it? No. They haven't done that since IE 4 on Windows 98!

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I don't really consider that to be uninstalling programs. When I remove a program and uninstall it, I want everything about the program to be gone. I want the entry from "program files" to be removed, from "application data," from "programdata," the virtual store, all parts of the registry, etc. I want it gone COMPLETELY. Of course, I may just be the minority in that regard as some people like the preserved settings.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what the --purge option in the package manager is for? Oh right, Windows.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[timeOday]

I agree this is a false conspiracy.

But since you mentioned uninstallation, I think it is a real problem. Installation / uninstallation should be managed by the operating system, so "uninstall" is an OS call that removes an application forcibly, whether it likes it or not. Like kill -9, except from disk instead of RAM. If people insist on having shared libraries (though I think they are overrated), then the OS should do the reference counting on them.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Freak]

^^ THIS

I enjoy the old classic Mac OS method: One icon covers the entire app.

Mac OS X apps that use the drag-and-drop method do this well, as well. I don't mind settings/preferences in a settings/preferences folder, but they should be obvious, and easy to clean. (Again, like OS X's ~/Library/Application Support, when applications use it properly.)

So if I want to get rid of Firefox, I should be able to go to /Applications and delete the single "Firefox" icon, then go to ~/Library/Application Support, and delete the "Firefox" directory. Then there should be *NO* way to know that Firefox was ever installed.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

what if you use rpm-based instead of deb-based linux? Is there an equivalent for one of those front ends (yum, up2date, etc.)?

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, all that's indicative of is poor garbage collection.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

I "uninstalled" IE9.
A few weeks later I double click a .gif on my hard drive...

Oh look... the default program for opening a .gif is an uninstalled internet explorer 9 for some reason.

Re:Spurious evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really couldn't remove IE from Windows 98 unless you made sort of a 95/98 hybrid. I know people who have done it and I know about 98 Lite, however, really, the only time IE was a separate entity was Windows 95

Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

IE 10 cannot be uninstalled and is required to enable the new 'Metro'-style apps.

Thanks Captain Obvious, 'Metro' apps are HTML5-based so what did you think was going to happen? That they would have 2 separate rendering engines? What would be the point of that? So you turn IE10 off and you don't see it, then you install whatever browser you want for web browsing, what's wrong with that?

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[Barlo_Mung_42]

Yep. This is a non-issue. Anyone who cares will not be walking into the MS walled metro garden anyway.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[shutdown -p now]

'Metro' apps are HTML5-based

Metro is not HTML-based. Only Metro apps written in JS have to use HTML5 for their UI. Metro apps written in C++ or .NET have their own XAML stack, which is completely different (though it does have a WebView control, which, if you use it, is of course hosted IE).

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

Yes i could be pedantic and go to the nth degree about where and when HTML5 dependencies occur but of course that would have no impact on the point.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[shutdown -p now]

No offense meant, and not trying to disprove your point. Just correcting the factual side of things, because, on Slashdot, comments can often be the only source of information about a certain technology (and especially an MS one) for many people, and then you end up with folks claiming elsewhere that HTML5 is the only way of writing apps in Metro - and proceeding with some conjectures that follow up from that. It doesn't help when the official dev story lacks clarity as much as it is...

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

Fair enough, last thing i want is that referenced in response to a [citation needed] regarding metro app capabilities ;)

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I missed the news where they came out with 'Metro' apps (pun intended). So they decided rather than come up with a slick bauhaus-inspired design aesthetic, they'd call the apps metrosexual and people would buy them? Maybe they're going for a playfully ironic naming scheme.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[Anonymous Coward]

'Metro' apps are HTML5-based so what did you think was going to happen? That they would have 2 separate rendering engines?

That there would be a rendering engine used both by the Metro-stuff and the IE.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

'Metro' apps are HTML5-based so what did you think was going to happen? That they would have 2 separate rendering engines?

That there would be a rendering engine used both by the Metro-stuff and the IE.

So exactly what they are doing then, both Metro HTML5 apps and IE share the MSHTML library.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[Tom]

That they do what HTML5 is supposed to allow - not worry about which browser is used for them?

Win8 will certainly detect if a "default browser" has been set up, just like Win7 and previous do. So it could easily find upon launching a "Metro" app if no default browser is installed and complain then. And if a default browser is set up use that.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

That they do what HTML5 is supposed to allow - not worry about which browser is used for them?

Because Metro isn't pure HTML5, so WinRT needs to use a HTML5 renderer and of course they chose their renderer, just like Opera choose their renderer and you can't change it.

Win8 will certainly detect if a "default browser" has been set up, just like Win7 and previous do. So it could easily find upon launching a "Metro" app if no default browser is installed and complain then. And if a default browser is set up use that.

Metro apps don't launch in the browser, and they aren't web apps.

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[Tom]

Ah, so basically, they've cannibalized another standard, and then abuse the dead corpse as an excuse for leveraging their monopoly yet again, yes?

Look, they aren't dumb. They know why IE has a minority market share on home PCs by now, and has been constantly falling for a decade, but is still the majority player in the corporate environment. Because an IT department tries to support as little different software as possible, and if there's already a browser in there that you can't get out easily, then the choice is absolutely clear and unless there is a really, really compelling reason not to, IE will be the offical company standard.

And that's why it's survived this long, despite being a horrible excuse for a browser (though I'll admit that IE9 appears to be somewhat workable).

Re:Can't be uninstalled

[exomondo]

Ah, so basically, they've cannibalized another standard, and then abuse the dead corpse as an excuse for leveraging their monopoly yet again, yes?

No, im not sure how you would come to that conclusion unless you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a standard is, Metro is not a standard and they haven't cannibalized HTML5.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

Use GNOME as your Desktop Environment. Then try uninstalling libwebkit-gtk (hint: some GNOME UI stuff requires webkit).

Why do you accept that and not accept that Windows can't rely on Trident for platform rendering guidelines?

Re:And Linux does too

[andresa]

And yet it is included on the commonly used distros. You can ignore that fact and go lalalala. Yes, it's not included in every distro, but on those that have any market share it is. And I too use a distro that doesn't have it installed for default, but if I used it in desktop I really would want it to have a browser, just so I can download Opera. If you want to to provide good OS to users, do you honestly think they would appreciate your effort in NOT allowing any browser within the OS and requiring you to use something like wget + text editor to find out the download link. Wtf is wrong with you?

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

A brain surgeon (with computing experience) would point out that standalone rendering engines have existed for years - and have existed for longer than any of the current browsers out there. Having the HTML5 rendering engine in a standalone DLL that could be replaced by anyone else's HTML5 rendering engine would NOT be an OS tie-in.

Since HTML5 rendering engines do NOT need a browser (since they can be standalone), a browser is NOT needed for this.

However, if you absolutely insist that a browser provide the library, a published specification (as per the requirements of the anti-trust suit, I might add) of exactly what functions are needed in the library, what name they must have and what ABI they must use, ANY web browser could be used. This is lawful under the requirements. A tie-in is NOT.

This is a flagrant violation of the law, which Microsoft will get away with because nobody dares start controversial lawsuits in an election year. Nonetheless, it IS illegal and it IS unnecessarily illegal. It is done this way for one reason and one alone - to kill competition. That is ALL it is being done for. It isn't for convenience and it isn't for the HTML5.

Re:And Linux does too

[Arancaytar]

Yes, it's really annoying how Linux won't let me uninstall Firefox.

This isn't even about unfair business practices (I'm not using Windows nor giving technical support to anyone using it, so what Windows does is irrelevant to me), but simply an incompetent design. If your house didn't let you rip off the wallpapers because they are a load-bearing part of the construction, you'd fire the architect.

Bias with HTML5 is normal

[Anonymous Coward]

There simply isn't any comparison between willful sabotage of the user and a simple pre-install, even if your claim that Firefox was pre-installed with Linux was correct.

MS is using a whole bunch of HTML and like the first time around, the have various extensions, just as every other browser vendor does. It's easier for their developers to target HTML + CSS + JS, so they do. When something isn't available in the specs, they create vendor-prefixed extensions, like other vendors. And since their developers want to save time and effort, they target and test on IE. Apple targets Safari, Google targets Chrome, Microsoft targets IE, Adobe targets Air... They all have strengths and weaknesses in integrating software components.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[andresa]

And Google does the same too, even wanting to create a replacement to JavaScript. They promote sites that say you are required to have Chrome to access it. It's much worse than IE.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[jd]

First off, not an excuse. Selenium means that testing one browser or a hundred different brands takes the same time and the same level of complexity.

Second off, no competent vendor has extensions to HTML, CSS or JS. Competent vendors do EVERYTHING in the standards, which are quite powerful enough. It is a mark of incompetency that Microsoft not only does NOT implement the standards, they fill the gaps with proprietary crap.

Third, developers should never test their own code. That is a sign of an untrained and moronic developer.

Fourth, if you are required by a court to SPECIFY all of these APIs and ABIs, then you are violating the law to not specify them. That is absolutely final.

Fifth, if you are required by a court to ALLOW a drop-in replacement for any given set of APIs and ABIs, then you are violating the law to not permit such a replacement. That too is final.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[jd]

JS isn't a W3C standard. It can be obtained as a standalone engine. Provided Google's Chrome can support the loading of that engine, it makes not one whit of difference whether Google adds other engines to Chrome or remove their own JS engine. The only requirement for JS compatibility is that SOME JS engine be loadable at SOME point. It doesn't have to be built-in.

In fact, it's probably better if it isn't. Lightweight tools are generally superior tools. Having JS as a plugin would ensure that you could use any JS out there -- if you wanted to -- but that if you didn't want to run JS at all, you had zero overheads. THAT is Superior Design. It is ALSO Classic Unix Design Philosophy.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[icebraining]

They promote sites that say you are required to have Chrome to access it.

Link?

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[omfgnosis]

Even if JS were a W3C standard, that shouldn't prevent Google or any other vendor from proposing and promoting alternatives. W3C isn't king of the WWW, and even if they were that doesn't mean they shouldn't be subject to challenge in that role. This is why we have HTML5, rather than XHTML2.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[shutdown -p now]

Competent vendors do EVERYTHING in the standards, which are quite powerful enough.

Can you please tell what the HTML5 standard for working with the camera is?

How about push notifications when the app is hidden?

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[yuhong]

In fact, on Windows, JScript and VBScript, while updated as part of IE until IE9, can be used by any application, and is used also for example by ASP. IE9 decided to fork JScript off Windows Scripting and update their engine separately while any other apps still get JScript 5.8. (MS did the same thing in forking ACE off Jet in Access 2007.)

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.allisnotlo.st/

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[Pi Is A Rational]

[Citation Needed] on Chrome required sites, please.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[Anonymous Coward]

Second off, no competent vendor has extensions to HTML, CSS or JS. Competent vendors do EVERYTHING in the standards, which are quite powerful enough. It is a mark of incompetency that Microsoft not only does NOT implement the standards, they fill the gaps with proprietary crap.

It's pretty obvious you have no idea what you're talking about and have absolutely no experience in the field since WebKit, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft all have their own extensions.
Show me hardware accelerated 3D in HTML/CSS/JS without extensions. What's that? You can't? Oh well it appears that by your own admission you're incompetent!

Third, developers should never test their own code. That is a sign of an untrained and moronic developer.

Actually it is a sign of a complete idiot who has no experience in the field whatsoever to suggest a developer not test his/her code.

Fourth, if you are required by a court to SPECIFY all of these APIs and ABIs, then you are violating the law to not specify them. That is absolutely final.

Oh but you haven't read the judgement have you, no it appears not, unless of course this statement wasn't meant to apply to Microsoft.

Fifth, if you are required by a court to ALLOW a drop-in replacement for any given set of APIs and ABIs, then you are violating the law to not permit such a replacement. That too is final.

As above.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[jd]

Show me 3D that requires that the page define whether it is to be rendered in software or hardware and I'll show you a specification that should be burned at the stake along with idiots like yourself.

I don't give a frag whether a given piece of 3D is rendered using SVG, VRML, GDML, OpenGL, DX11, PHIGS, Renderman, Maya, Rhino, Blender, a GPU, one of those insanely high-end nVidia modules that uses more power than every other computer in the house combined, that Chinese supercomputer built out of GPUs, or a cheese sandwich, so long as it is rendered correctly. The software should detect what options exist, use the best one (according to the built-in algorithm) and allow the user to switch to another.

There's bugger all HTML5 has to do with that process and only a moronic imbecile could think otherwise.

Rule 101, taught to EVERY BLOODY CS STUDENT ALIVE, is NEVER EVER EVER test your own code. You WILL miss things. ALWAYS have the code tested by someone else or - in the case of Extreme Programming methods where you write the test harnesses in advance - by something else. But NEVER test it yourself.

I read the judgement when it came out. I have worked with companies carrying out the court instructions. What's your excuse?

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[jd]

You are correct, which is why there are plugins for Tcl, etc. Selenium is technically a client-side scripting language. Flash is blob, so not a technically a script, but it is still run client-side. Dunno if the attempt to run Python client-side ever got finished. There used to be a Mozilla plugin that supported the X11 protocol. The SCRIPT tag has a TYPE attribute which gives the media type. There is nothing in the spec that says this must be Javascript, it can be anything at all - though it helps if the browser supports it. The spec, then defines any language that can be described with the media type as being a valid language.

If people want features X, Y or Z not in the official specification for language L, use a different media type. It's not like the code will run anybloodyplace else anyway.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[jd]

Blah
More blah

Happy now, or do you need me to hold your hand whilst you read them?

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[icebraining]

That link works fine in Firefox, you just need to click the link to use it anyway. And it doesn't say Chrome is required, it says it "may" not work with my browser.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[Nihilomnis]

Nope, sorry, works in Firefox insofar as it shows people's feet making letters, which I assume ( as I only checked in Firefox) is what it is supposed to do.

Re:Bias with HTML5 is normal

[shutdown -p now]

Have you actually read those links yourself?

The first one does not define any API. It lists the requirements for any future API on the topic that might be done as part of HTML5.

The second one covers how push notifications can be received from the server, and nothing about how they are displayed locally in the notification UI - esp. when the application in question is not running at all.

Try again.

What is the F problem?

[CheshireDragon]

I can understand if MS was trying to shut out other ISPs. As in the case with AOL and Windows 95. That way you could only get to the web using MSN. I really don't understand the problem with tying a browser into the OS. I could understand if in doing so would not allow another browser to install like Chrome or FF, but if it is not going to interfere then who cares and what is the problem? Can someone explain to me the issue?

Re:What is the F problem?

[Stewie241]

I don't think there is an issue. Maybe it is interesting to some people that they are doing it again?

I think the browser world has changed so much that this is largely irrelevant.

I think it is a waste of government money to intervene into this issue.

Re:What is the F problem?

[CheshireDragon]

Thank you for giving me a relevant answer! Finally someone who has sense...seriously :)

EU?

[suspiciously_calm]

Wasn't there an antitrust case in Europe about this, too? Will the European version(s) also have this?

no

[unity100]

it will be effective again. the conditions which made it effective havent changed. only in europe, its mandatory to have a ballot box, and there microsoft wont be able to pull shit. but in america, where it is possible to just pay a fine and keep going, they will. when microsoft did not oblige with ballot box decision in europe and started delaying tactics, eu started to fine microsoft 500,000 euro a day, and microsoft suddenly complied before a week turned out. america does not do that.

Re:no

[jonwil]

Can someone tell me how IE10 in Windows 8 will be any different to IE9 in Windows 7 regarding what browsers users use or how they choose that browser?

IE9 is part of Windows 7 but I am free to choose other browsers if I want (just as I was on Windows XP and other versions of Windows before it, having never used IE as my primary browser)

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

I don't. GNOME should permit any library that is API and ABI compatible and should not depend on specific implementations of anything. Used to be that GNOME did NOT depend on specific implementations, that you could choose between anything that provided identical functionality. Technically, since the source is out there, that's still the case but it should never have been the case that they restricted themselves to one solution alone.

Nonetheless, GNOME is not an Operating System, the Linux kernel won't break if you don't install GNOME (or indeed X). Whereas, Windows' kernel WILL break if IE is missing. Thus, your comparison is flawed. Probably knowingly.

Re:And Linux does too

[SomePgmr]

I don't know why you got all bent out of shape over what he said. Most of the common distros do come with a browser by default.

Re:And Linux does too

[andresa]

And yet Google making a whole OS where Chrome is the only browser.. no, the ONLY PROGRAM allowed is acceptable?

Re:And Linux does too

[chrismcb]

If you remove IE, components totally unrelated to web browsing or the Internet WILL fail, because the libraries are crafted to include totally irrelevant code that is critical for other components.

Anyone can make absurd claims. Windows libraries are not crafted to include totally irrelevant code. But the internet libraries do include code on how to render HTML. You can render HTML without doing web browsing, or even using the Internet. Like maybe you want to see the contents of a .html file that is on your local drive, or perhaps some internal Windows dialogs use HTML rendering?

Re:And Linux does too

[Grishnakh]

It doesn't, the OP is an idiot. Firefox just happens to be the most popular browser in Linux, but it's absolutely not required, and in fact is losing marketshare to Chromium and others. Some distros don't even have Firefox; I don't believe Kubuntu, for instance, carries it (it favors rekonq instead), though most users probably "sudo apt-get install firefox" right away.

Lots of Linux installations don't have any browser at all. I've got some ARM single-board computers here that don't.

Call me stupid, but how is this different?

[thecrotch]

A good chunk of the functionality in XP, Vista, and 7 is tied to IE. Try removing Internet Explorer and then using Windows Update (no WSUS server, that's cheating). So it will be tied into more applications, wonderful, I work in IT and thousands of new avenues of attack for malware writers means I get to feed myself by cleaning up the aftermath. Also, considering that we're rapidly approaching the era where OS is irrelevant, and that Apple today is not the Apple of 1997, is Microsoft even a monopoly anymore?

Who cares?

[CSMatt]

Before the Slashdot crowd starts getting all fired up about history repeating itself, how Microsoft is the Great Satan, blah blah blah, let me be the first to ask, right now, in 2011:

Why does this really matter anymore?

First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser. Indeed, we have reached the point in computing history where the OS is severely crippled if it didn't come with one. For all the IE hate that gets thrown around, how else are you going to download Firefox, at the very least? Mac OS X comes with Safari, which you can't remove. Many free software distros come with a browser (although I will concede that removing these are easier). Every mobile OS comes with a browser. Hell, iOS not only bundles Mobile Safari, but forbids you from any alternatives due to Apple's policies on not duplicating native features (and no, Opera Mini doesn't count).

Second, true IE removal hasn't been possible since Windows 95. De-selecting IE, as the article mentioned, only hid it from access. The only way to truly rip it out of your system would have been to use something like 98lite or XPlite, and then you would have to deal with all of the incompatibilities that followed. A number of applications on Windows assume IE is there, and actually removing the Trident engine from the OS will make you unable to use both Windows and third-party software that needs that component. Microsoft couldn't offer a true IE removal tool if it wanted to, because it would be accused of breaking both Windows and third-party applications that use the Trident engine.

Third, this should have been obvious from the moment Microsoft announced that Metro apps would use HTML5 and JavaScript. How exactly do you plan on running something in HTML5 and JavaScript without a rendering engine? So naturally disabling IE is going to disable Metro - there is simply no other way to run Metro apps. With that line of thinking, you might as well expect to run JARs without the Java VM installed.

The real concern with this news is:
1) How will this affect the security of the OS (as we're back to things like IE exploits affecting Windows itself, although reason 3 made that obvious anyway)?
2) Is Microsoft going to exert pressure on OEMs again to not bundle Firefox or Chrome with their computers?

If Microsoft makes it hard to get Firefox, Chrome, or another browser preinstalled on an OEM machine, then one can argue that there's an antitrust issue. Otherwise, this is just the logical conclusion of the path Microsoft chose for itself (Metro is the future, etc.) as well as everybody else more or less already doing the same thing.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, true IE removal hasn't been possible since Windows 95.

Then what was all the fan-fare about Windows 7 not requiring Internet Explorer? You can completely remove IE but keep the explorer.exe shell AFAIK

Re:Who cares?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

The whole browser antitrust suit was bullshit to begin with. Or at least the merits of it. The not allowing of alt browsers is hardly MS's biggest transgression. Not allowing for alternative boot loaders was.

How much do you want to bet the Firefox with Bing was an attempt to placate the doj when they announced this? "Sure you can ship an alternate browser, this Firefox bundle with Bing sure is attractive..."

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why does this really matter anymore?
Because tight unreplaceable integration into the OS is:
1) a barrier to any competing web browser, since they are only allowed to do a subset of things. You can install another web browser, but IE will still be there and Metro will still be running on IE.
1b) and like last time, IE will be able to use any and all inside knowledge Microsoft has about how Windows works (undocumented APIs and so on), and can be given preferential execution/preloading/caching treatment by the OS. The same sort of thing Microsoft has done before. Oh, and since it's going to be on less powerful devices (tablets, appliance PCs, netbooks/smartbooks), the performance difference from these advantages may be quite vividly noticeable.
2) a guarantee that any security flaw in the browser is a security flaw in everything else that uses the browser code. Particularly a big deal in windows 8, since they want to use html and javascript for everything.
3) a lever by which Microsoft can try to use its monopoly (or at least near-monopoly) to seize control over web standards by starting from within the way windows 8 is implemented. The same sort of thing they've tried before a few times. You'll have to code for any IE differences to write Metro stuff, which promotes doing the same for web pages, which continually makes it a pain in the ass for anyone who isn't Microsoft to make a browser (or an OS in general, since IE is windows-only).

Re:Who cares?

[subreality]

First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser.

The problem isn't that the OS comes with a web browser.

The problem is that Microsoft, who has a monopoly position in operating systems, is leveraging that position to gain control of another market (web browsers). That's an immoral business practice, and that is exactly why we made it illegal with antitrust law.

Re:Who cares?

[yuhong]

1) How will this affect the security of the OS (as we're back to things like IE exploits affecting Windows itself, although reason 3 made that obvious anyway)?

The key question would be how many apps using MSHTML uses it to load remote (as opposed to local) content?

Re:Who cares?

[Mullen]

Mac OS X comes with Safari, which you can't remove. Many free software distros come with a browser (although I will concede that removing these are easier). Every mobile OS comes with a browser. Hell, iOS not only bundles Mobile Safari, but forbids you from any alternatives due to Apple's policies on not duplicating native features (and no, Opera Mini doesn't count).

Sorry, wrong, "sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.Safari50SnowLeopard" for those on Snow Leopard with Safari 5, and there is also another for Lion. In MacOSX, you can remove iTunes, Safari and just about any other app that is installed that you don't want installed. People tend to think that OSX is really tightly tied together, but it is not.
Also, WebKit for iOS can be replaced with another framework, you just have recompile your iOS apps. However, WebKit is based off an Open Source Software package and also happens to be used in Android too. From what my iPhone programming teacher was telling us, "Any HTML that works in iOS, should also work in Android". When it comes to web stuff, Apple does not play the same level of shenanigans as Microsoft.

Re:Who cares?

[halivar]

Your argument is 10 years out of date.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the only problem is if IE is the only browser and doesn't support standards, which was the problem before.

Re:Who cares?

[Obfuscant]

The not allowing of alt browsers is hardly MS's biggest transgression. Not allowing for alternative boot loaders was.

No, forcing hardware vendors to sell a Windows license with every system they sold if they wanted to sell them with any system was. As an early linux adopter, I got really tired of paying extra for MS-DOS, and then Windows, on every system I bought, just so I could wipe the disk and install something usable. I was never prevented from installing an "alternative boot loader". Lilo never complained that it couldn't write itself to the MBA.

By the way, I was buying systems with taxpayer dollars. If you paid taxes in the US in the late 90's, you were helping to send money to MS. Bill sends his thanks.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

how else are you going to download Firefox

sudo aptitude install firefox? =)

Re:Who cares?

[EdIII]

Very well put.

However, as I stated elsewhere, it would have been very nice if the Trident engine could have been replaced with a 3rd party alternative.

HTML5 and JavaScript will require a rendering engine. I don't have much faith that MS will provide a top notch rendering engine. So concern #3 really should be, "can it be replaced?".

I'm tired of MS not rendering a page the same way all the other browsers would. If they just cooperated and competed solely on the merits of how well theirs performs this truly would be a non-issue just as you say it is.

Only reason why people want to make it an issue is because MS is not as good as the others. Plain and Simple.

Re:Who cares?

[tepples]

I was never prevented from installing an "alternative boot loader".

I guess you missed the recent stories about UEFI secure boot. All PCs that ship with Windows 8 (OEM version) are required to ship with UEFI secure boot turned on and with Microsoft's certificate loaded. They are not necessarily required to let the owner of a PC turn off UEFI secure boot or install other operating system publishers' certificates.

Re:Who cares?

[subreality]

The monopoly is in operating systems, not web browsers. An increase in non-MS browsers on that chart indicates a success of antitrust law, not a failure.

Re:Who cares?

[tepples]

Also, WebKit for iOS can be replaced with another framework, you just have recompile your iOS apps.

I was under the impression that any other framework rendering HTML and JavaScript would get the app rejected by Apple.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the Slashdot crowd starts getting all fired up about history repeating itself, how Microsoft is the Great Satan, blah blah blah, let me be the first to ask, right now, in 2011:

Why does this really matter anymore?

It matters if and only if they bribe/threaten other companies to keep users from having a choice. Just like last time. The fact that most slashdot commenters are uninformed and stupid doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's actions were illegal.

Re:Who cares?

[tepples]

Now how do you download aptitude?

Re:Who cares?

[ks*nut]

Gee, I don't seem to need a web browser to install Firefox in Kubuntu. Of course I needed a browser to download the OS, but I seem to almost have too many choices on how I want to configure the system to behave. Seems that Microsoft is just taking a different course to try to arrive at the level of control exerted by that other non-free OS.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is getting fired up. Most of the comments, certainly the up-modded ones, are all negative towards the article, not towards Microsoft.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't force ANY vendors to sell a Windows License.

They offered a volume discount for providing it on all of their systems.

Vendors took them up on this offer.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure where you get your rant about Apple at but there are numerous browsers you can download for iOS, all from the App Store. Dolphin Browser, Atomic Web Browser, etc.

Re:Who cares?

[duguk]

Before the Slashdot crowd starts getting all fired up about history repeating itself, how Microsoft is the Great Satan, blah blah blah, let me be the first to ask, right now, in 2011:

Why does this really matter anymore?

You're right; I'm not convinced it does matter. Previously, the biggest problem was that many (generally, poorly written - or Microsoft) applications would open HTTP links with Internet Explorer, leaving users liable to exploits.

I haven't seen this happen for a long time - and there's plenty of applications which require a rendering engine (be it IE, Webkit, or XUL, etc). Would the only alternative to keep these fools happy be for Microsoft to provide two versions of the rendering engine, one for Internet sites and one for Metro and other apps? Ridiculous.

Re:Who cares?

[trboyden]

You can take it a step farther, not only does every O/S come with a browser, they also come with web browsing framework. In Windows it's the .NET WebBrowser class that uses Internet Explorer technology, on Mac OS/iOS and Google Chrome its WebKit, on Linux (Gnome) its Epiphany. So literally every O/S has web technology baked in. So no, the argument is moot at this point. And frankly the average consumer doesn't care what the browser is as long as they can get to the Internet, so there would be little to base an Anti-trust battle on again because you wouldn't be able to prove the consumer is being hurt.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

To remove Safari, drag it to the trash.

Re:Who cares?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I should've been more clear.

OEMS were forced to only include MS' bootloader. There was a huge hullabaloo where Hitachi wanted to ship a line of machines with both Be and Windows. Unfortunately, MS said no. MS settled the antitrust case out of court for a goddamned pittance.

Re:Who cares?

[symbolset]

Like the last time it's going to bite them in the ass as the internecine incompatibilities make migrating from one version of their OS to another a trial by fire, and less attractive than adopting one of the many platforms with easier shifts.

Re:Who cares?

[drinkypoo]

Since Microsoft is using their HTML engine to render all kinds of stuff including, on occasion, dialog boxes, they would have to be complete tools to allow you to replace it.

I do recall a tool that would let you patch applications which embedded IE to embed Gecko instead. I used it on UT successfully. It's been a while though.

Re:Who cares?

[halivar]

It's about the fact that people are flocking to 3rd party browsers despite IE being embedded in the OS. It's proof that there was no browser monopoly to begin with. The better browser wins. It's not anti-trust laws, but rather "the invisible hand" that pimp-slapped IE marketshare.

And if Chrome and Firefox keep bloating and IE keeps slimming, it can all be turned around; IE vs Netscape redux. Not that I want to see that happen, at all.

Re:Who cares?

[UpnAtom]

Opera, still the best browser, is nowhere.
Firefox got a ton of free media publicity, had zero costs and made a dent against a vastly inferior browser.
Chrome, which is spyware, is only making progress because of the marketing power of Google Search.

It's not as simplistic as 'MS abused monopolostic powers' but they did and the internet was twisted as a result. Webmasters still have to code for broken IE 6.

Also, as a capitalist, I have to say that your belief in the 'invisible hand' is naive at best.

Re:Who cares?

[Kevin Fishburne]

Newegg will either stop selling those motherboards or modify their return policy once the storm of returns from Linux users begins. They may even add a filter to separate the "Linux-compatible" boards from the "MS-only" boards. In the end they'll support both hopefully.

Re:Who cares?

[peppepz]

I don't think so. Historically, motherboard manufacturers have always ignored Linux. See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened. That's because Linux users, even if many as an absolute number, are too few compared to the whole computer-using population. If installing Linux on commodity hardware becomes a lottery, which is clearly what Microsoft is aiming at, then the Linux community will shrink even more and potentially become irrelevant as, say, the Darwin community or the OpenSolaris one.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

true IE removal hasn't been possible since Windows 95. De-selecting IE, as the article mentioned, only hid it from access.

While I can't vouch for the truth of this statement any more than I can deny it, I can relate from personal experience that Windows Vista allowed me to (think that I had?) delete IE until a system update around late 2008 or early 2009 when it automatically reinstalled it. Thereafter, it could not be moved or deleted by any means I knew. I was unable to find a way to remove it from online sources, and eventually settled for doing something to disable its functionality. I still have apps on my windows install that always launch IE despite its not being the default browser.

Re:Who cares?

[Kevin Fishburne]

I think more people use Linux than you think they use.

Re:Who cares?

[N1AK]

They are not necessarily required to let the owner of a PC turn off UEFI secure boot or install other operating system publishers' certificates.

So Microsoft should specify in its contracts with OEMs that they have to allow users to turn off secure boot when it makes no difference to their software? If Microsoft was requiring OEMs to do something that stifled competition then it'd be a problem they caused. They aren't. It isn't.

Only on Slashdot can this kind of bollocks cause so much controversy while the fact that iOS expressly forbids people from releasing apps that compete with Apple's own software barely gets a mention.

Re:Who cares?

[N1AK]

Opera, still the best browser, is nowhere.

In your opinion, which doesn't make for a strong argument in most other people's minds. Personally, I've tried Opera on and off and like it but I've never preferred it to either Firefox or Chrome. Even on websites where the visitors tend to be 'tech-aware' use of Opera remains comparatively low. These are users who know about Opera, who can choose their own browser and don't. That has nothing to do with monopoly powers.

Secondly, even if by a remotely valid measure Opera was the best browser the fact that it doesn't get publicity could be why it isn't more widely used. That's nothing new. It's hardly unusual for a product to fail because the company has failed to generate interest.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

>So naturally disabling IE is going to disable Metro - there is simply no other way to run Metro apps

Flawless victory.

Re:Who cares?

[tepples]

So Microsoft should specify in its contracts with OEMs that they have to allow users to turn off secure boot when it makes no difference to their software?

It should in order to avoid a second high-profile antitrust trial just as the oversight period from the last one ends.

Only on Slashdot can this kind of bollocks cause so much controversy while the fact that iOS expressly forbids people from releasing apps that compete with Apple's own software barely gets a mention.

Part of this is because there's a clear Android-powered alternative to any iOS device, be it an iPhone (any Android phone), an iPad (ASUS Eee Pad Transformer), or the iPod touch (the recently released Samsung Galaxy Player 40). There isn't much competition to, say, pre-built PCs with Windows other than buying a Windows machine and pressing your luck with installing Ubuntu or Mint alongside it.

Re:Who cares?

[gsnedders]

Indeed. You're not allowed to have anything that allows third-party code-execution on iOS, so a JavaScript interpreter is instantly out. You might get away with having an HTML parser (though it does duplicate built-in software, so might still get rejected), but that's not massively useful in this day-and-age. This is the reason why Opera Mobile and Firefox for Mobile aren't on iOS.

Re:Who cares?

[Mullen]

Indeed. You're not allowed to have anything that allows third-party code-execution on iOS, so a JavaScript interpreter is instantly out. You might get away with having an HTML parser (though it does duplicate built-in software, so might still get rejected), but that's not massively useful in this day-and-age. This is the reason why Opera Mobile and Firefox for Mobile aren't on iOS.

I would agree. I have never submitted an app to the App Store, but I think you could get away with your own HTML parser but not Java interpreter.

Re:Who cares?

[Cajun Hell]

Why does this really matter anymore? First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser.

The subject isn't "every OS." It's The One OS which comes preloaded on 90% of computers regardless of what the purchaser wants, in order to prevent the purchaser from making a choice about what OS to run, so that a market doesn't develop or if one does, at least it will remain stunted and distorted.

Of course a man should be allowed to take a walk in the park whenever he wants to. You and I are allowed to, so it's an outrage that the government restricts this one man's freedom, as this is ultimately a threat to every man's freedom.

That really does make sense, until I tell you that the man in question lives at the penitentiary because he shot a convenience store clerk to avoid having to pay for a case of Keystone Light. And he did it in front of many horrified witnesses who were pleading with him up until that moment, "don't shoot! Don't shoot! Somebody, stop this guy! He is about to shoot the clerk! Dude, please don't do it! That clerk has a wife and kids! Please don-- shit, I have convenience store clerk brains all over my shirt, anyone got a towel? Keystone? You did this for Keystone?!"

Second, true IE removal hasn't been possible since Windows 95.

Agreed. Keeping prisoners in the penitentiary has never really caused any dead convenience store clerks to become alive.

this should have been obvious from the moment Microsoft announced that Metro apps would use HTML5 and JavaScript.

I agree. The moment the man said he wanted to take artistic photos of people enjoying their time at the park, it was obvious that the criminal intended to leave the penitentiary. How did people think he intended to take the photos? When they say he shouldn't be allowed to leave, WTF are they thinking? Not letting him go is totally going to interfere with the photo project.

If this criminal can reasonably assure the public that he's never again going to kill another convenience store clerk, I think most of the public might be accepting of his leaving the prison. By analogy, the public might be less alarmed by Microsoft's plan to eliminate application competition within Windows, if Microsoft would stop making Windows preload deals with the hardware OEMs. If the system doesn't manipulate more people into running Windows than want to, no one will care that Windows manipulates more Windows users into running IE than want to.

Re:Who cares?

[Cajun Hell]

the fact that iOS expressly forbids people from releasing apps that compete with Apple's own software barely gets a mention

People bitch about Apple's interference in that tiny market all the time. The difference is that it's a tiny market. If you go buy a smartphone, it is pretty unlikely you will end up with one that has Apple's software on it, so Apple's shitty behavior won't end up affecting to you.

Now go buy an already-assembled x86 machine and see what happens. You can avoid Microsoft there too, but unlike Apple avoidance, you'll have to work at it. And that's you, Slashdot poster; what about non-geek children? Please, think of the non-geek children and how UEFI may prevent their first computer, which they buy not realizing that it can't ever be upgraded, from ever having a decent OS, and how that will end up influencing browser market share.

So Microsoft should specify in its contracts with OEMs that they have to..

If Microsoft weren't making contracts with OEMs, we wouldn't even be talking about this. This is the shit that originally caused the problem. 99.99% of software companies get by without ever doing anything like that; unlike Microsoft, they have to convince users that their software has merit.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, forcing hardware vendors to sell a Windows license with every system they sold if they wanted to sell them with any system was.

Oh those poor poor billion dollar companies. There exist and have always existed OEMs that do not install Windows on PCs if you don't want it. Oh they didn't become successful like Dell or HP? Quick ! Call the government...

By the way, I was buying systems with taxpayer dollars. If you paid taxes in the US in the late 90's, you were helping to send money to MS. Bill sends his thanks.

What a retarded argument. Those taxes were also used to purchase printers. OMG.. HP made money !! If you didn't want any Microsoft OS, buy from a different OEM or build your own PCs.

Re:Who cares?

[0ld_d0g]

Interesting.. does the OS work properly once you remove Safari? I think the OSX App Store might be using safari libraries...

Re:Who cares?

[EdIII]

Since Microsoft is using their HTML engine to render all kinds of stuff including, on occasion, dialog boxes, they would have to be complete tools to allow you to replace it.

But why would they be complete tools?

Anybody that would be replacing the rendering engine more than likely knows what they are doing. What would be replacing the rendering engine would have more features, better performance, etc.

I don't see why they would have to be complete idiots to do it. Actually, I see them being complete idiots to not make it easy to do.

Same mentality behind IE. They thought they were so *big* and so *dominant* that the whole world had to fall in line and just take what they dish out. They could *dictate* the standards.

In the last 10 years it has become abundantly apparent to everyone including MS that they were wrong. Cooperation with open standards is the only way to move forward. MS, especially with IE, will only dominate again *if* the product can stand up on its own merits. Which it is starting to do against FireFox right now. My preference is Chrome, IE, then FireFox. I never thought I would say that either.

So in that spirit, I ask again, why would they be complete tools to allow you to do this?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So? What gives you the right to force Dell/HP/etc to make a product that you want if they don't want to? Buy a Mac or build your own PC using motherboards they use in linux server PCs which will obviously allow for non-ms operating systems. Nobody cares...

Re:Who cares?

[Obfuscant]

See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened.

I suspect that most people running linux desktops never consider how much power their system consumes and don't know about this problem at all. This bug is invisible to them. On the other hand, not being able to install linux AT ALL will definitely be noticable to anyone who cannot do it.

Re:Who cares?

[geoskd]

Why does this really matter anymore?

Because MS will use the default nature of their browser on their 90% market share to push users to their web portal (bing). Because the vast majority of users don't know there is a choice, they will effectively be rendered into using MS other service offerings artificially. This will make it artificially easier for MS to compete in areas outside of their core in spite of any quality failings of these other products. In short it allows MS to compete effectively even if their product offering is vastly inferior to the competition. Thus MS can basically avoid any standardization, provide a crappy product and still drive their competition out of business, all without having to invest any significant capital in R&D. In short, in the end it is all the things that antitrust was designed to prevent because it is the consumers who ultimately get hosed.

-=Geoskd

Re:Who cares?

[drinkypoo]

Since Microsoft is using their HTML engine to render all kinds of stuff including, on occasion, dialog boxes, they would have to be complete tools to allow you to replace it.

But why would they be complete tools?

Because they want to be able to trust that what they ship will behave the way they want it to ship (think patches) without having to test on anyone else's OS components. That is not unreasonable. If you are so damned clever, you can probably patch your own rendering engine in anyway. And if you really wanted the freedom to do that, you would have been running Free Software anyway, so this is a silly argument at best.

So in that spirit, I ask again, why would they be complete tools to allow you to do this?

Like I said, they want to be able to trust that their patches are going to work right, and they can't trust that's true. It's their prerogative as salesmen of a closed-source OS to maintain some measure of control so that they can speak with some authority when they discuss Windows. It only makes sense. They're not selling you the right to do anything you want with the OS, they're selling you the right to give them money when you want customizations.

Re:Who cares?

[EdIII]

Because they want to be able to trust that what they ship will behave the way they want it to ship (think patches) without having to test on anyone else's OS components. That is not unreasonable. If you are so damned clever, you can probably patch your own rendering engine in anyway. And if you really wanted the freedom to do that, you would have been running Free Software anyway, so this is a silly argument at best.

Free Software can be a choice when it is just you. In business environments, often the choice is made for you already.

As for silly argument.....

You mean that their patches and updates cannot patch and test their rendering engine directly? There is no disclosure from 3rd party rendering engines or MS that replacing their built-in rendering engine means they are not the responsible ones?

I don't find my argument to be that silly at all, and updates and patches are not a good excuse when it is so easy to work around it. I never even mentioned removing the complete removal of their rendering engine. Just calling a different one.

As for the closed-source OS, that is what is starting to kill them already. Making the OS to be flexible enough so that 3rd party components can be swapped in and out only makes their platform, and product, better. IT people like me could get behind it a lot faster if we knew how easy it was to replace core components.

MS could always make better components you know..... thereby making the whole argument moot.

Re:Who cares?

[Zaphod-AVA]

And the fact that the 'better' browsers all found a way to be delivered to users for no monetary cost has no bearing?

Before Microsoft spent millions developing IE and bundled it with Windows, browser software was something people bought.

Re:Who cares?

[drinkypoo]

MS could always make better components you know..... thereby making the whole argument moot.

This, of course, begs the question.

Re:Who cares?

[halivar]

I do not necessarily see the decommoditization of (what is now) basic desktop functionality to be a bad thing.

Re:Who cares?

[UpnAtom]

I largely agree. Most of what makes Opera superior has either been copied by other browsers, is well-hidden (massively configurable UI without bloaty extensions) or is something you only realise the value of when you use it a lot (gestures).

I don't know why you'd use spyware aka Chrome. FF finally catching up to Opera/Chrome's speed makes it a worthy competitor.

Anyway my point was more that capitalism almost never makes the superior product the most popular. Instead it's the one with the best marketing muscle. Firefox got a lot of nice free publicity and we should all be grateful. But MS left the door open. They practically stopped development of IE for 4 years, their biggest mistake yet.

Only because the public don't realise how much Google is spying on them do they use Chrome. And of course, it would be nowhere without Google's immense marketing power.

Politics is much the same. Marketing over quality every time.

Re:Who cares?

[CSMatt]

Because MS will use the default nature of their browser on their 90% market share to push users to their web portal (bing)

IE does this already, and it doesn't seem to be doing much to eat away at Google's usage share. At any rate, why not complain that Firefox is pushing Google as the default search engine, maintaining Google's enormous usage share of search engine traffic? Google could use the competition, and nothing stops users from entering "google.com" in the browser, as I imagine the tech illiterate were doing all along.

Because the vast majority of users don't know there is a choice, they will effectively be rendered into using MS other service offerings artificially.

Um, no. This isn't 2001. IE usage share is dying, and fast. Everyone but the most tech illiterate at least knows about Firefox and Chrome, and more than likely knows someone who is using either browser, if they aren't themselves. All the while IE still came preinstalled with each copy of Windows, just as it had since 1996, and Windows usage share hasn't changed enough in the last decade to attribute this to more OS diversity. At this stage, you have people using IE either because they don't care what browser they use, actually prefer IE, or are forced to use IE because of corporate intranet or specific Web site issues. Only the last one concerns me, as it artificially forces a choice of Web browser.

This will make it artificially easier for MS to compete in areas outside of their core in spite of any quality failings of these other products. In short it allows MS to compete effectively even if their product offering is vastly inferior to the competition.

IE9 is actually a really good Web browser, far better than the previous IEs. I have no reason to believe that IE10 won't be equally as good. Microsoft's IE team actually seems to care now about making a decent Web browser, since they know that they can't just ignore IE anymore in the face of Firefox and Chrome competition, despite IE's continued status as the default Web browser (see above).

Thus MS can basically avoid any standardization, provide a crappy product and still drive their competition out of business, all without having to invest any significant capital in R&D. In short, in the end it is all the things that antitrust was designed to prevent because it is the consumers who ultimately get hosed.

Microsoft tried this, and it worked for a few years. Then Firefox came and crushed them. Now Chrome is crushing Firefox and IE. All the while regulatory bodies were nowhere to be seen. Microsoft's own incompetence did them in.

Also, in retrospect, IE was Microsoft's only real bundling success with Windows. Let's look at what else they've thrown in:

• Windows Media Player: had a good run, but it's lack of MP3 support for years made it lose out to Winamp, and later iTunes.

• Windows Messenger: AHAHAHAHAHA

• Outlook Express/Windows Mail: I don't have any real stats here, but from my observations most people with a real need for a mail client usually turn to the full version of Outlook first. Everyone else uses a webmail service of some sort. In any case this isn't even part of Windows anymore.

• Windows Movie Maker: Fair enough, this one did really well with amateur YouTubers. If anyone else used it, I haven't noticed. This one is also no longer included with Windows.

If this were 10 years ago, when IE ruled the land and locked everyone in with no hope of an end in sight, I would have agreed with you. But times have changed, and IE has been dethroned. Not even Microsoft's old tricks are going to get it back to 90+% usage share again.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are plenty of iOS alternative browsers now. Atomic Web amongst others.

Microsoft's halfway decent OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

Every other OS they release is turdtastic. XP and 7 are examples of usability that fixed enormous problems in their predecessors, which is why M$ is, while getting ready to release 8, still trying to kill XP. 8 will be like Vista and ME, garbage no one wants to be forced to use. Fortunately, there are now alternatives. The teens will be the decade of Linux on the desktop. It's already the decade of Linux (Android) on the tablet/phone/...wristwatch?... :^) I can't wait to read the headline, (in about 7-10 years...) "Microsoft has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection..." oh, it'll be zarking great!

Viva OSS! Viva LibreOffice, Viva Firefox, Viva Android, and Viva Linux!

Re:Microsoft's halfway decent OS's

[PJ6]

The teens will be the decade of Linux on the desktop.

No. Never. Not in any decade.

Re:And Linux does too

[Ethanol-fueled]

Because we can choose to use KDE or Enlightenment instead. We can also use Firefox and not have to have Opera(for example, taking place of IE) waste space on our computers.

If Microsoft are so badass, and willing to make all of those kitchy well-publicized challenges to *nix, then why don't they make the latest version of IE cross-platform(IE and office were once available for Macs!) and let it really compete?

Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are three of the most highly-regarded browsers and all run on all three dominant platforms without hacks.

What about IE and Safari? No? Then crawl back to your walled gardens.

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

Included is not the same as required. Even if you installed Ubuntu (which has Firefox), you aren't required to install it. It's optional. Thus it isn't tied in. Further, even if you install it, you can later uninstall it when you discover Chrome does most of the stuff Firefox does better.

Firefox isn't in the OS in Linux (or any other OS). Firefox isn't an OS program. It is a user application. There is a HUGE difference. It is hard to describe all the ways it is different without causing the Slashdot machines to run out of space for database files, there are that many.

Removing Firefox from an installation won't cause X11 or the Linux kernel to destabilize. Removing IE will cause Windows 8's kernel to break at the lowest level.

No, that's not because Windows 8 does low-level graphics stuff. Install KGI (the Kernel Graphics Interface) or use Framebuffers extensively. Run X through them. Run KDE through them. Run a browser - say, Opera, Chrome, or even Firefox, through KDE. Now trace through the code and show me where KGI or FB code directly invokes a Firefox library. I dare you to try. Go on! Should be easy.

Yes, users do NOT appreciate any web browser in the OS. They want browsers in Application Space, where a bug won't cause the machine to crash and where switching to something else is easy rather than a 8-month hack with VTune, process-grabbing debuggers and a decompiler.

Re:And Linux does too

[aXis100]

Why the hell is a user interface on a PC rendered in HTML5????

Re:And Linux does too

[meerling]

Talk about brain-rot. He said NOTHING about any browser being required by the OS, rather that there SHOULD be one there even if only for the reason that you can EASILY GET THE BROWSER YOU WANT.

Sheesh, some peoples hatchlings...

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
done. owait, that leaves behind components like ieframe.dll; and iexplore.exe will be restored during platform updates. Who says that you totally removed Safari?

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

Actually, the basis of the Windows 95/98 lawsuit and the later IE bundling under XP lawsuit was that libraries ARE crafted to include totally irrelevant code. Indeed, it was Microsoft's position in the lawsuit that Felton's hack could not possibly work BECAUSE they had included such code. (Felton's hack worked because it left the extraneous code intact and in place.)

Nonetheless, even Microsoft disagrees with you. Under oath.

Re:And Linux does too

[GameboyRMH]

andresa looks like another MS negative-marketing shill to me.

Re:And Linux does too

[icebraining]

In the summary: "IE 10 cannot be uninstalled and is required to enable the new 'Metro'-style apps."

His reply: "And Linux does too, With Firefox"

How did he not say anything about any browser being required by the OS? It's right there!

What pisses me off more...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is that Microsoft corporate logo on the story headline instead of the Bill Gates Borg image.

Re:And Linux does too

[yuhong]

It is not totally irrelevant. An HTML renderer is handy for many other applications, like help. Apple added an HTML renderer to Mac OS 8.5 to support help too.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE was never "independant from windows", a lot of things rely on the shared dlls lumped together with IE, even the browser-choice in the EU doesn't actually "not install IE", it just installs another browser alongside IE and puts no shortcuts to IE anywhere.

Re:And Linux does too

[icebraining]

The difference is that ChromeOS has fuck all influence on the browsers market share, while whatever comes with Windows will affect is immensely.

Re:And Linux does too

[exomondo]

The difference is in Linux you can uninstall Firefox and It's not required for some of the new toys to work.

Both IE10 and the 'Metro' apps depend on certain libraries, if for some reason you consider those dependencies to be part of any one application that depends on them then removing everything that you understand that application to be would also mean removing those dependencies thus any other applications that depend on those libraries will cease to work. They could statically link the dependencies to the Metro runtime and IE10 but that just then means binary duplication and update duplication and in the end the code that is shared will still be there anyway just duplicated in binary form so what's the point?

Re:And Linux does too

[yuhong]

The problem is that most apps that uses MSHTML is dependent on IE-specific features and quirks, so another rendering engine would not be easily droppable in place without modification. Even Apple faces a similar problem with WebKit being a part of Mac OS X. In fact, both MSHTML and WebKit are full of application compatibility hacks. Not that it would be impossible to detail in a spec, but...

Re:And Linux does too

[yuhong]

Correction, Windows's *shell* depends on IE.

Re:And Linux does too

[omfgnosis]

Why not?

Re:And Linux does too

[yuhong]

Removing IE will cause Windows 8's kernel to break at the lowest level.

Not the kernel, the *shell* which happens to be part of Windows, unlike Unix.

mental note

[Anonymous Coward]

Never read an article on crn.com
Reporting outrageous claims such as
"OS vendor doesn't allow removal of rendering engine from UI"
"Disabling a component and re-enabling it doesn't remove user preferences, shock horror!"
"Disabling feature also disables a dependant feature"
isn't going to win my continued advertising revenue

Saw it coming...then again

[T-Mckenney]

I saw this one coming, especially with the way WinRT is going to be laid out. But then again, I don't see the issue. You can install another browser and no even bother with IE. IE no longer has the monopoly it did, and for the first time in a while, IE (and finally Windows) has to fight to stay relevant. Especially with the Smart Phone/Tablet market gaining some serious speed. Even Linux and OS X are making a little more headway. Windows is still the desktop Juggernaut, but it has no appeal, and when consumers find somewhere else to go, they flock to it. MS is learning that the hard way. On the flip side of that coin, lets look at iOS and Android, they bundle a browser even more deeply integrated into the OS. So, you do have a choice out there now that makes more sense. Microsoft will get it eventually, or die off.

HTAs

[dreemernj]

Metro seems like an upgraded version of HTAs. HTAs are applications written in HTML + CSS + Javascript that run as standalone apps with standard application privileges on Windows. They are just HTML files renamed to .HTA that Windows runs with mshta.exe. They started back with IE5.

Metro is clearly an improvement, but it is also clearly not some brand spanking new path down which MS is traveling. It is taking something they've been doing for over a decade and fleshing it out a lot more.

So where's the drama? Is there any? Or is this just standard "OMG THIS NEW THING IS NOTHING LIKE THE OLD NEW THING!"

Re:And Linux does too

[andresa]

And Google really, really badly wants to change that. By far they're succeeding too. http://gs.statcounter.com/

This is getting old

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we bored with attacking Google and Apple, so now we turn back to Microsoft. Who fucking cares. There are so many options now that weren't around 10-15 years ago. You can easily pick an Android tablet and a Linux distro and go on your way. Or buy into Apple's walled garden. Or Google's. Or Microsoft's. Does it really matter any longer? Pick your poison. No one has a monopoly.

Re:And Linux does too

[rubycodez]

And all modern OSes Do include a web browser really? which browser comes with Z/VM or Z/MSE?

Re:And Linux does too

[rubycodez]

back when I ran Kubuntu I didn't get a firefox, I got a Konqueror. Now I'm running Debian XFCE and I have a seamonkey

Oh cool

[L1B3R4710N]

Any semblance of desire to run Windows 8 I had is now completely gone.

And you're surprised...?

[Nom du Keyboard]

And you're surprised why? Short of a permanent injunction this was completely predictable. Now the fun would be if they're taken to court over this again and have to remove IE again after welding it back in once more.

Re:And you're surprised...?

[MrKaos]

And you're surprised why? Short of a permanent injunction this was completely predictable. Now the fun would be if they're taken to court over this again and have to remove IE again after welding it back in once more.

They certainly have my antitrust.

Illegal? Why?

[Aqualung812]

Why is this illegal? Do I have to buy Microsoft in order to have a computer?

Counter point: Why isn't it illegal to bundle English into the OS?

Re:Illegal? Why?

[jd]

Because you can't gain a monopoly on English by exploiting a monopoly on Windows.

You can and WILL gain a monopoly on browsers by exploiting a monopoly on Windows.

The latter is a criminal offense, for which MS has been convicted (twice), and no amount of asking "why" will change that.

Stupid

[baegucb]

They didn't learn their lesson. And no, I didn't read TFA.

Slashdot crowd with a history lesson here.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Despite the fact that web browsers were considered commercial specialty products in the late 1990s, that era was one of completely non-standard "quirks" HTML. While Acid2-era HTML4/CSS2 is perfectly standardized and supported by all modern web browsers, HTML5/CSS3 is not, it's practically Quirks Mode II. Passing Acid3 is really a gimmick in comparison to Acid2.

The reason Internet Explorer took the market over Netscape was that Microsoft provided an extremely high-quality browser for 1997 in an age of non-standards. It was far more secure than Netscape -- it wasn't vulnerable to crashing your system with the XSS loops people posted on each other's Guestbooks at the time. IE 4/5 was insanely fast compared to Netscape, which involved watching a logo with stars fly most of the time even outside of 28k modems.

But the reason IE 4/5 took over was because of quirks. Netscape was horrible to develop a cutting-edge website with. And IE was very tolerant to bad code -- Netscape would stop rendering the page if a /table tag wasn't included, IE wouldn't. The second a web developer made a popular site "Best viewed with IE", the end user use their bundled IE to visit that site. And not long after, they would use IE for everything else.

Bash Microsoft all you want, but history is repeating itself. IE10 is seriously fast and has some serious, but user-friendly lockdowns on security. IE10 feels as nice as Chrome but uses far less memory. Firefox, like Netscape, since version 3 has been building its perception as incompetent bloatware and is likewise being dumped. Unlike IE 6-8, IE10 is a seriously competitive browser.

And Microsoft has plenty of time to regain the old IE browser share. The way the W3C bureaucracy works, HTML5 likely won't be standardized until 2022.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#W3C_standardization_process

*TLDR*: All MS has to do is to make a very nice bundled browser, ensure everything is written to its own quirks, and it's 90% of the market share again. It's the 90's again except with high-bandwidth multimedia and 3D shooters in CANVAS tags.

Re:Slashdot crowd with a history lesson here.

[Billly Gates]

History is different today than pre 2001 too.

  I agree with IE 10 being not sucking as much as I get flamed here on slashdot for that. IE 9's hardware acceleration makes it the best browser for multimedia sites on my computer with a decent graphics card. MS realized they were getting burned and see IOS with html 5 applets as serious threats and realized their own browser sucks horribly bad and simply could not compete with it nor Firefox. IE 9/10 were the results of a new direction.

However, I doubt it will get that 90% markethshare thanks to driod phones and Ipads and Chrome. Windows 8 will make serious inroads for sure in the corporate market, but IPads are popular too. Driods are popular too which use webkit. In the 1990s only PCs and Unix workstations had net access so one platform with 95% marketshare could twist the whole market etc.

This is good and from what I see is IE is very standards compliant and not lockin heavy like with IE 6. IE 6 really did suck and won not because it was better but it sucked least in my opinion at the time. IE rocked in the 1990s in the pre CSS days of static html like you said, but becomes a nightmare with advanced content seen in the last decade. It just couldn't handle AJAX and CSS 2 with html 4 with large amounts of tags without getting creative.

Chrome if anything is turning proprietary and it even includes its own scripting language Dart. My prediction is tablets and subnotebooks will become more popular and IOS and Andriod will start running on a few of them and the rest will run Windows 8. Multiple browser support will discourage heavy lockin as even many corporations want their employees in China not in front of their pcs to access their html 5 intranet applets on their phones etc. A corporation could use ActiveX or Metro and tie it to a workstation but they lose many advantages like portability. 10 years ago it was difficult to not make it heavily embedded in a MS ecosystem to do anything useful. Today it is difficult to tie it in vs using open technologies.

Even if W3c wont finalize until late it wont matter. IE in the past refused to support drafts from w3c to avoid issues like the box model when the finalized standard changed. MS now supports drafts and IE was the sole reason webmasters couldn't use anything new because 50% of their visitors used IE. That is gone now.

A better browser is good for everyone because some poor saps need to support it.

ok.. you can't uninstall the browser from..

[Anonymous Coward]

the Chrome OS as well ;)

The Solution!

[morari]

It’s worth noting that when you “turn off” IE 10 in the Windows 8 Developer Preview, you also turn off the Metro interface. No IE 10, no Metro apps.

That sounds like a very simple and elegant solution to both the problem of having Metro and Internet Explorer on a machine. Windows 8 might be worth using after all. :)

Re:The Solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 might be worth using after all. :)

Hey! Slashdot should have a filter for drunk posters like the parent!

Re:The Solution!

[aztracker1]

I was almost thinking the same.. though I would probably leave IE10 for testing against.. would like to get rid of the Metro UI, and have the win7 start/taskbar.

And the community service begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the end user, all it does is ensure that someone in the OpenSource community will create a removal tool for the software. It's unfortunate that this work has to go to someone/some people who is/are not being paid for their diligent work.

Re:And Linux does too

[jonwil]

Fact is, parts of IE are used by all sorts of OS components and applications (Microsoft and otherwise) as a networking library and rendering engine (e.g. MSN, Media Player, Explorer, Windows Update, Office, Visual Studio, HTML help and many many third party applications).

Re:And Linux does too

[gfxguy]

HTML Editor != Browser, even if it's required by a browser.

The problem is that MS can create an HTML5 rendering engine... then the OS can use it, and the browser can use it... the OS shouldn't NEED the browser to use it. it'd be like requiring a specific MS game in order to use DirectX

Re:And Linux does too

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The two actions are approximately similar(since a .app is a specially named directory, the equivalence might be slightly greater if you nuked the entire Internet Explorer directory):

Each will remove the user-visible browser, and probably result in some fun errors when other programs try to hand off a URL; but deleting Internet Explorer won't have any effect on MSHTML.dll, and deleting Safari won't remove the Webkit framework from OSX. With some further digging you could probably strip those out as well; but that isn't really relevant.

MSHTML and Webkit aren't considered "unremovable" because of some super DRM, they are considered functionally unremovable because they are expected features of their respective OSes and 3rd party applications routinely depend on them without any sort of graceful fallback...

how else are you going to download Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp.

Re:And Linux does too

[icebraining]

I think you're confusing Chrome with ChromeOS. Chrome has plenty of marketshare by itself, not because it's pushed by an OS, since ChromeOS doesn't even appear on the charts.

All hail the demise of Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right folks, you saw it here first. Microsoft, the aging dinosaur, falling back on old habits was stuck in the quagmire of stupidity. Only to die, dragging the corpses of the predators trying for a last free meal off the rotting carcass.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

And all modern OSes Do include a web browser
really? which browser comes with Z/VM or Z/MSE?

Are you being obtuse or are you just too retarded to make the connection that what he meant was general consumer computer operating systems, you know, the kind for which you do actually want a web browser?

Re:And Linux does too

[exomondo]

Having the HTML5 rendering engine in a standalone DLL that could be replaced by anyone else's HTML5 rendering engine would NOT be an OS tie-in.

Why would they bother with that, in fact why would anyone in the world actually care? Do you suggest every company give the option to substitute all shared libraries in any software? Does it magically become ok if they just statically linked that code? And who really cares if the rendering engine used in Windows is also used by IE? No-one.

Developer Preview

[yayotters]

They're making these claims while using an unfinished developer preview of Windows 8? Are you kidding me?

Re:Developer Preview

[unixisc]

Yeah, between now and next year, ain't there enough time for MS to reverse that decision if it sees that that decision is not liked in the market?

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, users do NOT appreciate any web browser in the OS.

You're delusional if you actually think that, back here in reality we know the users couldn't give a shit if the OS depends on web browser libraries. And i'm not sure you know what you're talking about anyway, the OS doesn't have a web browser in it, it just depends on some common libraries that originated from IE, which is logical, why would you re-write them.

Embedding IE in Windows wasn't Microsoft's sin

[Theovon]

It was anticompetitive behavior. For many years before Netscape even existed, Microsoft had been requiring, among other things, PC makers to pay for a copy of DOS for every machine sold, even if it didn't ship with DOS. Yes, Microsoft was leveraging IE to stomp on Netscape, but restricting what Microsoft could do with IE in Windows was a legal remedy that had nothing to do with anything technical.

In fact, embedding a web browser into a desktop OS is a technically sound idea. Every other OS maker does it, and for good reason. Back before web browsers came on the scene, Windows had a help facility that provided a primitive form of markup and hypertext. But when HTML became the dominant markup language, and it became apparent that every OS was going to need to include a browser, and therefore an HTML rendering engine, the old help facility markup became redundant, and it was sensible to just use the web engine behind the help system.

There are lots of things besides web pages that can find a use for an HTML toolkit. Even in the 90's, I recall using an off-the-shelf application that embedded Netscape, because it was mostly written in HTML (and some extensions, I assume).

Didn't shakespeare say..

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill the lawyers?

Footsies

[glorybe]

I think Microsoft has enough connections with the government to get away with a lot of things that they should not be allowed to get away with. Since our government is all about snooping these days I find it hard to believe that Microsoft does not make penetration and study of PCs that run their software quite easy. And it seem that IE is sort of famous for getting hacked into by just about everybody.

Not sure it really means anything

[triceice]

Forget the Slashdotters and other people with above average technical knowledge. As far the average person goes I don't think it will mean anything. The problem is not that MS offers an inferior product, the problem is that too few people really know any better. Or care to! If they can view their FB page and see that stupid video they just don't notice or care.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

I can install a browser in linux easiest by opening a terminal and typing sudo apt-get install firefox

What in hell could be easier?

Chrome?

[caywen]

I wonder what happens if I try to remove Chrome from, say, hmmm, Chrome OS. Am I left with just OS?

Gotta consider that as long as we're comparing behavior to Linux.

Re:Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use chrome os, and I can assure you that nothing happens. If you are in debug mode, you will see command prompt, if not just the status screen.

You will have to do some ugly things to make the kernel/other libraries depend on chrome. Ugly/hacky code isnt something I expect from Google.

Not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this as a problem, at least not in the same light as it was in Windows 95OSR2/Windows98
In Windows 95OSR2 (That is OEM Service Release 2), they bundled IE4 but claimed it was a "critical" part of the OS, which it wasn't. They just meddled with IE4 so it could replace "explorer"

I do see where they were going with this, and were largely successful at it (see how we can't get rid of WindowsXP and IE6 now?) but it then backfired at Windows XP, where large corporations like eBAY and AT&T write inhouse software that requires IE and does not work in firefox and can't migrate to Vista or 7. eBay uses a mixture of things, but they use the MSIE browser engine, they came up with their own tabbed IE browser that they subsequently built some horrible cruft on top of, KANA, which is completely broken on Firefox and barely works in MSIE (most of employees hate the web KANA and use the old non-web KANA software) and another tool based on MSIE for listing removal which also depends heavily on .NET and MSIE. See the pattern? Then there is AT&T which went from a software called AXYS to a horrible cruftpile called SIEBEL which was a painfully slow activeX plugin into MSIE. Both of these companies were using Windows XP, and probably still are. Next time you wonder why the representative on the other end can't do their job in a speedy fashion, blame MSIE.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this whole argument is that there really isn't that much of a distinction between a browser and a rendering engine. Internet Explorer is not much more than a lightweight UI and some utility functions wrapped around the Trident engine.

Re:And Linux does too

[symbolset]

Well, since you asked that would be to be using an apt-url supporting OS and browser and clicking on an apt-url link like Get Firefox. That would be easier. You could do it right inside the online forum where you read about this hot new browser.

Injunction junction, code malfunction

[FyberOptic]

How long until some Microsoft-hater-fueled group tries to get an injunction against this in somewhere like Europe, where they've had a much easier time pushing Microsoft around? That would hurt all of Microsoft's customers in Europe (aka, the majority of computer users there), because it would essentially eliminate all of Metro and a good portion of the cross-architecture functionality that they're building into the OS.

But hey, who cares about that, as long as you're keeping the playing field even for all of the other commercial operating systems! Except, you know, there aren't any for Microsoft to hurt, remember? OSX already integrates similar technology in its Dashboard widgets (not to mention Microsoft really isn't a threat for the kind of people who would use Apple to begin with.) And Linux isn't really a commercial product for desktop users, but could implement something similar any time they wanted. And let's not forget Chrome OS, the entirety of which IS a web browser, but also free so no competition problem there.

Just wait, somebody will try it, though, and there will be plenty of tech-retarded out there to back them up.

Compare to what! Google?

[twebb72]

Android does this, and there is a grand amount of googleware (and bloatware) in every Android phone available on the market. Isn't that also an anti-trust issue of the same magnitude? After all, not having a google or exchange account with their OS seems to make that fancy new Android device an expensive brick in your pocket.

Some how, Google doesn't seem to catch as much flak as Microsoft. Does Google get away with this merely because the OS is free? I understand that providing the OS and buying the OS are different business models -- but they are 100% equivalent usage models. Shouldn't the usage model also be considered? Perhaps Microsoft should just open source Windows, because it certainly seems to keep google out of the hot seat.

But I hear Google isn't releasing much source code recently anyway... Interesting

Re:Compare to what! Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android does this, and there is a grand amount of googleware (and bloatware) in every Android phone available on the market. Isn't that also an anti-trust issue of the same magnitude?

MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Bundling something with this monopoly from another market undermines competition in that market. Google has monopoly influence on what market? And they are bundling it with what other market? With regard to phones Google is bundling things from markets where they do not have monopoly influence. This is legal because it does not undermine competition. Google does run afoul antitrust concerns in other areas and they have had to change behaviors as a result. It is the same laws applied to everyone... you just haven't bothered to learn what the laws are or why they exist.

Re:And Linux does too

[SomePgmr]

I read it just fine. He said most any modern OS should have a browser out of the box, and the next guy flipped out. The topic of MS making IE mandatory for use of metro is tangential.

And deep breaths man, nobody kicked your dog.

Plenty of other software leaves settings too

[Sycraft-fu]

Some of it asks, most of it just leaves them anyhow. The assumption is you might later reinstall and would like things to be setup the same. I have more than a few data folders for apps that are no longer on the system.

Also in the case of IE there's a reason they don't remove everything: Many apps use the HTML engine. The lower levels of IE is called Trident and is their HTML engine. Much like Gecko is the low level of Mozilla.

Well the thing is, since it is a ready made HTML rendering engine guaranteed to be with Windows, apps choose to use it, rather than to roll their own. They need simple HTML rendering for something, they just use that. This includes some widely used things. For example Steam used it until rather recently (when they went cross platform). Skype still uses it.

Thus to truly remove "all" of IE is to break all those apps.

Remember modern OSes are more than just a kernel. They are a whole set of APIs and services provided to software. You can't just strip that out and expect everything to work.

I'd say it's no big deal I'll never run Windows 8.

[Trax3001BBS]

Yet I said that about Windows 7, I use it now because Battle Field 3 requires
DirectX 11. I only use Win7 for BF3. I boot back into XP 64bit when I'm not
playing - but I can foresee myself being forced into Windows 7 even though
I don't care for it - well I've already been forced, but full time usage.

I have a PS3, but I find gaming is just much better on a PC.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

rm -rf /Applications/Safari.app done.

Nope, webkit is still there, just like trident is still there when you remove IE and for an extreme minority of people with no discernible reason other than to complain, that is not acceptable.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the HTML5 rendering engine in a standalone DLL that could be replaced by anyone else's HTML5 rendering engine would NOT be an OS tie-in.

Why would they bother with that, in fact why would anyone in the world actually care?

I would, and so would many people based on this thread. As to why you would want to do it. Several reasons
* Another works better
* Another has more features
* Another is more secure
* You like another one better.

There are many others.
As to being able to substitute shared libraries, that is one of the founding principles of Unix and even to this day on gnu/linux systems there is almost no component that cannot be replaced; Hell you can even change the entire kernal if you want to.

Re:And Linux does too

[causality]

I read it just fine. He said most any modern OS should have a browser out of the box, and the next guy flipped out. The topic of MS making IE mandatory for use of metro is tangential. And deep breaths man, nobody kicked your dog.

You don't seem to comprehend what you read. The guy was rude but he didn't "flip out". He explained why IE is not like Firefox. The topic of IE's "mandatory" status isn't tangential; it's the very point being made. Keep clicking "Parent" and see for yourself. If you were better able to follow a conversation you'd have realized that.

The part you don't seem to understand can be explained. The significance is that a blanket statement that is so general as to be irrelevant, like saying "a modern OS should have a browser", is useless for purposes of comparison (this subthread began because of a comparison if you recall). That's precisely because it is true regardless of which browser you're talking about. You might as well point out that the computer uses electricity or that it contains transistors. While true, it doesn't tell you anything about the browsers themselves or the problems with IE's particular arrangement.

Namely, the mentioned OS that comes with Firefox (Linux) does not require a browser or even a rendering engine and certanly doesn't consider either to be an essential non-installable component. It's right here in the comment you replied to but clearly didn't comprehend. At no point did he argue, imply, or even mention that a modern OS should *not* include some kind of browser or that modern distros don't. Yet you responded as though he had.

You're shocked that someone called you on it? Welcome to the Internet, man. I'll tell you what. If you want to shock me, or something close to that anyway ... accept a goddamned correction now that it's been explained to you two different ways. You could also realize that there is a connection between refusing (deliberately or by default) to obtain a clue about what is going on and receiving impatient, rude responses that are nonetheless accurate.

Metro apps are NOT HTML5-based

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a sec. As revealed the Build conference, Metro-style apps depend on a whole new set of APIs called WinRT. You can write Metro apps with C++ and DirectX and never use any HTML at all. Or you can use your favorite .NET language and use XAML to create your UI. Again, that doesn't use IE to render it.

Also, there are two versions of IE 10: one Metro-style and one for the old desktop. So which one are you turning off? Stupid article.

Typical Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh it's for market share alright.

Not IE10's market share, but Win 8's marketshare.
Microsoft knows that its days of IE being the browser top dog are over.
What it hopes to achieve is to leverage on the Windows platform and get more users to its online services and products.
Microsoft is also attempting to unify the desktop, tablet and phone OS.

This was mostly the same reason why IE9 was denied to Win XP, and why IE10 will be denied to Win Vista.

Similar for DirectX, Windows Media Player etc.

You *gotta* upgrade to the next big Windows release! Otherwise, how else are you going to get access to these wonderful, innovative technologies?

My personal opinion is that Microsoft is making a fatal mistake by combining the desktop OS with the tablet/phone OS.

It should have done it like Apple - OS X for desktops, iOS for portable devices.

Re:And Linux does too

[causality]

In the summary: "IE 10 cannot be uninstalled and is required to enable the new 'Metro'-style apps."

His reply: "And Linux does too, With Firefox"

How did he not say anything about any browser being required by the OS? It's right there!

I hope these two are drunk or otherwise suffering (enjoying?) some temporary impairment of their higher cognitive functions. I would rather believe that than believe that the school systems have so deeply failed them or that they are truly so dense.

To make an error is one thing... to still not see it after it's been pointed out is the part that blows my mind.

In comparison to TrustedComputing

[staalmannen]

In comparison to the Trusted Computing, this embedding of IE10 in Win8 is the lesser of Evil Plans. If regulators should be looking at something, it would be to require that OEMs allow their consumers to unlock the computers and add new security certificates. Otherwise we might get a situation where it is VERY difficult to install something different on a "Win8 certified" computer. This might not be a problem for those already in the game (there would brobably be ways to "root" the computers the same way one now has to jump through hoops to install something different on a phone), but for the curious starting with a dual boot with Ubuntu, this could be a huge issue.

Re:And Linux does too

[Anonymous Coward]

And Google really, really badly wants to change that. By far they're succeeding too. http://gs.statcounter.com/

Have you ever tried learning the most basic facts about something before making concrete claims about it? It works better that way.

Re:I applaud Microsoft for their raspberry keyhunt

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the "new Microsoft" remembers how Windows/Office brought it to power and now seek to do the same with WindowsNext and IE. Wish they'd innovate... Its like the Cain Mutiny all over again.

Re:And Linux does too

[datavirtue]

those guys are dropping or smoking some good shite

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

Actually, yes. A lot of people "bother with that". In the scientific computing world, it means you don't have to care *whose* BLAS or LAPACK library you use. This is great. You can design using standalone libraries designed specifically to assist debugging and run against parallel libraries optimized for sheer speed - even when they're written by completely different groups.

In the GUI world, do you really care if you're using Motif or Lestif? Or whether that's really SGI's OpenGL or actually the Mesa 3D library? Can you name a single X11 program that breaks when using a custom implementation of X11 rather than the reference version? After all, it links to all kinds of libraries!

So, yes, every company -- barring Microsoft -- already gives the option to substitute ALL shared libraries. Microsoft is about the sole exception and it is a stupid one.

Does anyone care? Well, define "care". They care that their programs "just work" and that they don't need a billion essentially identical libraries to get them to do so. They care that they can tune and tweak. They care that updating external components or replacing them with something functionally the same will not break anything.

They don't care which specific library is installed, unless there's one optimized the way they want, precisely because things "just work". There's about a dozen standard C libraries - not because anyone seriously thinks people want to get the complete set, but because that lets users tailor their system to their needs, rather than tailoring their needs to what some vendor has decreed.

THAT is why they would bother.

Who cares if the rendering engine is shared? Well, if it's the rendering engine that is shared, take it out of IE and make it an independent shared component. Then people can uninstall IE if they want. Tying the rendering engine into IE and thus preventing people from uninstalling IE is not a sound software design, it is merely an abuse of a monopoly in an effort to gain another monopoly. Which is a criminal act.

People WOULD care if they could replace the rendering engine. There are other HTML5 rendering engines out there and being able to replace one with another would allow me to use whatever look-and-feel I liked without having to replace the GUI entirely. I should not have to replace Explorer, but I point out that you CAN. That people HAVE rewritten Afterstep as an Explorer replacement. That project was damn popular. Why? Because people actually DO like having a say over the L&F.

Re:And Linux does too

[datavirtue]

Actually no. Having a user -- over the phone -- open a terminal and type apt-get install firefox is much easier. You trying hanging on the phone for an hour with my grandma or aunt and direct them through the damn GUI. Not fun, I have to lay down after I'm done. I have had them both open command lines and run commands, it is much easier than having them navigate control panel apps or the like.

Re:And Linux does too

[datavirtue]

ahh...the pedantry, it is why I come here

Re:And Linux does too

[datavirtue]

Jebus chris wuz that englis?

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

Yes, you can replace the entire kernel. Not just with another Linux kernel - anything that supports the Linux ABI will work, so you could replace the Linux kernel with Lynx if you wanted. FreeBSD should also work. There are probably others.

It goes beyond Unix. Intel defined the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard to facilitate ANY OS whatsoever running ANY software from ANY OTHER OS, provided both were written to the spec. Thus, there's nothing to prevent you from running a Solaris application dynamically linked to a Unixware library all under the Linux kernel. Yes, even Intel believed that vendor interoperability was important.

Internal to the kernel, it makes bugger all difference whether you're running the graphics through Framebuffer, KGI, a proprietary driver that can bind to X or a graphics-to-ASCII-art converter (yes, they exist). Everything still works exactly the same, except that Doom looks a bit odd. It still works, though.

Re:And Linux does too

[exomondo]

Actually, yes. A lot of people "bother with that". In the scientific computing world, it means you don't have to care *whose* BLAS or LAPACK library you use.

No, BLAS and LAPACK are not HTML rendering libraries, so that is clearly an invalid basis for the idea that anyone cares about replacing the HTML rendering engine in Explorer.

So, yes, every company -- barring Microsoft -- already gives the option to substitute ALL shared libraries.

What a load of rubbish. Can i swap out Opera's rendering engine? No. Can i change Photoshop's windowing libraries? Sure can't.

Does anyone care? Well, define "care". They care that their programs "just work" and that they don't need a billion essentially identical libraries to get them to do so.

They care that their programs 'just work' rather than swapping out different rendering engines to make different programs work because that program was designed to work with a specific rendering engine even if that is a shared library. I can't swap out statically linked code but for some reason you see a difference between code that is statically linked and code that is in shared libraries.

They care that they can tune and tweak.

No, an extreme minority care about that, most people couldn't care less about it.

Who cares if the rendering engine is shared? Well, if it's the rendering engine that is shared, take it out of IE and make it an independent shared component.

It is an independent shared component, how do you fail to understand that?

Then people can uninstall IE if they want.

They already can, but you can't remove libraries that other applications depend upon, obviously. If they statically linked the rendering engine code to both IE and Explorer separately you could remove everything installed by IE completely because there would be no co-dependencies.

Tying the rendering engine into IE

The rendering engine is not tied to IE, IE is tied to the rendering engine.

is Metro even useful?

[Kevin Fishburne]

What exactly is the benefit of creating an app that requires a browser which can exist on only one OS? If Metro apps require IE, and IE only works on Windows, then Metro apps will share the fate of ActiveX controls; a legacy annoyance which never should have been.

Seriously....

[Anonymous Coward]

People are still whining about this shit? This was a ridiculous farce the first time this came up.

OMG, MS is pushing their own browser IN THEIR OWN OPERATING SYSTEM, KILL BILL GATES AND INSTALL SAFARI!!!!1!11 OMG LOLWTFPOTATOES!!11! Perhaps IE couldn't be uninstalled by regular means in previous Windows versions (which is their right since they own the fucking OS), but there was never anything that prevented you from running other browsers. Get the fuck over it you whiny bitches.

I guess anyone can just put whatever "app" they want on itunes, oh wait, no they can't. Fucking hypocrites.

Re:And Linux does too

[symbolset]

You can't email them a link? It's easier and faster to spell words out over the phone? sigh. Apparently your grandma responds better to your approach than mine does. Whatever works for you.

Re:And Linux does too

[symbolset]

BTW: If you're going to support family members' computers in Linux you might look into VNC server, or another remote desktop or secure shell option. It will save a lot of time and frustration to just remote in and do it for them. For hard cases video chat on their cellphone or tablet can be helpful too, as you can make them show you that it's plugged in and "point the camera at the screen and hold it still" is often quicker and more useful than a screenshot.

Plus, Google and Apple are the New Evil

[Courageous]

Plus, Google and Apple are the New Evil... aren't they?

I mean Microsoft, Bill Gates is just so cuddly.

Re:Plus, Google and Apple are the New Evil

[elrous0]

Probably helps that Bill Gates retired and is doing some good in the world. Better than Steve "Steve Don't Do Charity!" Jobs ever did.

Re:Plus, Google and Apple are the New Evil

[Courageous]

Plus Steve liked to park in Handicapped spots. Seriously. Dickhead. Brilliant, but a dickhead.

Re:And Linux does too

[drsmithy]

I don't. GNOME should permit any library that is API and ABI compatible and should not depend on specific implementations of anything.

It likely will, as probably would Windows.

The difficulty of writing such a drop-in replacement, however, would be immense (and of highly questionable benefit).

Whereas, Windows' kernel WILL break if IE is missing.

Rubbish. IE is userspace code. Nothing in the Windows kernel has a dependency on IE.

Re:And Linux does too

[E IS mC(Square)]

Apologies. But you clearly missed the point, and yours was not first to do so, and you just reiterated the GP which was clearly uninformed/confused/troll - hence a stronger reaction from my side.

Apparently, causality (777677) has already done a better job at explaining it, so I wont repeat it.

Re:And Linux does too

[drsmithy]

Not the kernel, the *shell* which happens to be part of Windows, unlike Unix.

You need to look long and hard to find unix systems without /bin/sh.

Here is your positive comment

[NotesSensei]

Mondrian would be proud that Metro picked up his art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian

Lynx?

[ArundelCastle]

Windows still has a command line, right?
I don't use it often enough to know...

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

No, no, no and no. Go back to kindergarten where you belong.

Problem only for MS

[Zo0ok]

This is just a problem for Microsoft. I mean, the way they tightly integrate everything they have into a mess that is unmanageable, mostly for themselves, is provokingly stupid.

Re:And Linux does too

[jd]

IE has not been (strictly) userspace since Windows 98.

More like Apple

[pablo_max]

Personally I would like to see MS become more like Apple and encourage healthy competition, whilst not participating in anti competitive behavior. wait...

Re:More like Apple

[elrous0]

Everybody's a comedian.

Re:And Linux does too

[exomondo]

Crying 'no, no, no and no' doesn't change the fact that I'm right, it just shows that you aren't capable of comprehending what was written. Grow up.

Chrome OS?

[savuporo]

Uhm.. if you cant bundle a browser with the OS these days ... where the hell does this leave Chrome OS .. or any other tightly web technologies based OS or OS wannabe like WebOS ?

Re:Chrome OS?

[shish]

Uhm.. if you cant bundle a browser with the OS these days

The antitrust case wasn't saying "bundling is illegal", but "using a monopoly in one market (operating systems) to steamroller over the top of superior products in another market (web browsers) is illegal"

Re:Chrome OS?

[neminem]

Notepad is a complete joke of a text editor compared to almost any other text editor made in the past 10 years or more, but nobody complains that M$ uses its monopoly on OSes to steamroller over other text editors (many of which, unlike in the browser "market", aren't even free software). Why is that?

Heck, Windows 7's file manager is a buggy piece of garbage, too, and there are replacements for it as well, but nobody complains that a file manager is bundled, either. Why? Maybe because this whole argument is silly, as far as I can tell.

Re:Chrome OS?

[neminem]

(By free I meant "as in beer", just to make that clear.)

Pretty sure that you're missing something

[LostMyBeaver]

Internet Explorer itself is nothing more than a user interface around the Internet Explorer rendering engine in Window. Anyone who wants to can release another browser app based on it.

The entire Metro UI is in fact an Internet Explorer based browser. Meaning, it's a new UI to Internet Explorer's engine but with touch support and gestures. The Metro UI applications are in absolutely no way different than those found in Chrome or Opera these days. In fact, it should be relatively easy for a developer to use WebKit or something else to make a Metro UI app player for another OS... just need to make it full screen and add AppX package support.

So, what people are actually complaining about is that Internet Explorer's icon is still present on the computer. I have a very fancy solution to this.... delete it. Then Internet Explorer is ALL GONE. Then use whatever browser you prefer.

Re:Pretty sure that you're missing something

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll need to delete iexplore.exe too, not just the Start menu and Desktop shortcuts

Bring back the borg picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe ballmer with a chair in flagrante delicto or something.

Re:And Linux does too

[drsmithy]

IE has not been (strictly) userspace since Windows 98.

By all means, please identify the parts of IE that run in kernel space, and that the kernel depends on.

Re:And Linux does too

[unixisc]

Is rekonq even ready the Kubuntu has started recommending it? Assuming that Konqueror's last version supports HTML 5 and can run YouTube, I'd say that Konqueror would have been a better choice. Also, all the Debian OSs that I'm aware of come w/ IceWeasel, rather than Firefox

never understood the fuzz

[SuperDre]

I have never understood the fuzz, if people wanted a different browser they could go ahead and install it. A lot of developers even use parts of IE for their own application as it's always available on a computer.

A browser is just a part of a modernday OS, just like a mediaplayer and a anti-malware solution. Normal consumers don't want the fuzz of having to decide which browser they want (they are all good and bad points), they just want to start the computer and go online without any hassle.. When you buy an Apple it also comes with everything preinstalled. Also with a lot of Linux distributions default apps are installed..

If you don't like it, then just don't use it and get your own favorite application, it's that simple..

Re:never understood the fuzz

[shish]

When you buy an Apple it also comes with everything preinstalled. Also with a lot of Linux distributions default apps are installed.

Bundling is fine; the antitrust complaint is about leveraging a monopoly in one market to steamroll another market

If you don't like it, then just don't use it and get your own favorite application, it's that simple..

On the contrary, for people who don't know that an alternative even exists (pretty much all computer users in the 90s, and a sizeable chunk today), downloading an alternative is pretty much impossible; and then people with clue can't use good browsers either, if their job depends on being compatible with the masses

Re:never understood the fuzz

[SuiteSisterMary]

Browsers aren't a 'market' these days, any more than a TCP/IP stack is a 'market'.

Re:never understood the fuzz

[SuperDre]

But what is a 'good' browser.. FF, Chrome, Opera or Safari aren't better browsers, they all got their pro's and con's.. mostly people have a distaste of IE because it's from Microsoft, not because it might not be a good browser.. In your example, Apple users would always use Safari because they also wouldn't know about other browsers, so it's completely the same..

Re:And Linux does too

[icebraining]

Why yes, yes it is. Far from perfect, of course, but still better than what a large number of native speakers write.

I'd apologize for it if help, instead of mockery, had been offered. You can just fuck off.

Everybody else does it these days

[The High Druid]

Huge fuss over nothing. Tell Microsoft they have to remove IE from Windows when Apple allow Safari to be removed from iOS devices

Re:Everybody else does it these days

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it every time this topic comes up a hundred idiots immediately draw a false analogy? If a monopolist can't bundle a product from a monopolized market with one from a non-monopolized market; why can someone else bundle two products from a market where there is no monopoly? Gee, because it isn't leveraging a monopolized market genius. That is what is illegal and it is illegal for obvious economic reasons if you bothered to gain a freshman level education in economics. Why are smart people so willfully ignorant, yet assertive when it comes to topics where they are clueless?

Opting out of Windows 8

[EmagGeek]

I already have a smart phone. I don't need my desktop to be a smart phone, let alone a Windows smart phone.

The problem is IE is the source of many attacks

[Anonymous Coward]

And, since you can't get rid of it (I can install GNOME or XFCE and remove Konqueror completely), you now have a gaping hole.

There are many HTML renderers. MS USED to allow you to plug in a different HTML renderer. And there's no reason why an HTML renderer is necessary with all the whizzbang of the internet for purely system purposes. If the system libraries were IE's HTML rendering WITHOUT ActiveX, then there would have been much less of a problem with the security of Windows.

And since you cannot get away without buying a Windows license in any reasonable scenario and copyright makes DEMANDS that break the purchasing rules (try getting your money back for Windows, and merely using the OS is now constituted acceptance of the license for a pre-activated copy), the inclusion of IE is STILL a monopoly problem.

That's Ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already decided to stick to win7 anyways.

CHROMEOS ANYONE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok so MS cant do this and it is bad, but Google can make the OS one big browser and its good and ok?

Hello pot, I am kettle.

Yes, Safari still works.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever wonder if you could have found out? Or were you only interested in insinuation?

so?

[Anonymous Coward]

given the propensity of Chrome and Firefox taking over a large chunk of market share, even with IE installed in Windows, no one can really complain anymore.

Apple includes Safari by default on all Macs, yet no one complains about that.

Back to IE fragmenting?

[toddmbloom]

So now, again, we'll have to support IE 8 and below for those that aren't on Windows 7, IE 9 for those on Windows 7, and IE 10 for Windows 8? Why is there even a browser SO dependant on the Operating System, any way, that you NEED to be on one specific version just to use it any way?

What happend to the Bill Gates cyborg logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happend with our Bill Gates cyborg logo?

Re:And Linux does too

[gfxguy]

And yet that's what it is... a UI wrapped around a rendering engine; the same rendering engine that the OS uses.

Frankly, given that so many of the components the browser needs would need to be kept anyway, I don't give a flying leap that the rest of IE can't be deleted (without side effects, anyway), just pointing out that the browser shouldn't be required. But given modern systems with 1TB hard drives and many GB required just for the OS, I don't care that a few MB are wasted. I haven't bothered deleted IE from the Windows XP I use to play my old games, either... I just don't care. At this point I think people are just being nit-picky. You buy a 1TB for well under $100, a few MB is meaningless and you're still not required to use their browser for browsing.

Still... it IS a valid point. The OS shouldn't require the browser... I would say if it did that it is an artificially created tie, despite the fact that I don't care.

Can U completely remove MacOS X's Safari?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. That being the case, then why's MS being "singled out" thus??

OK...

[tangelogee]

What I don't understand is why it's such a big deal that Microsoft does this. Google's Chrome OS is built from the browser up, it's not like you can remove that. And components from Safari are used for iTunes, etc in Mac OSX. Why don't people go after them about the same issue?

Re:And Linux does too

[rubycodez]

Are you obtuse? There are plenty of consumer device operating systems without a browser, for example your car's OS doesn't have a browser. Are you one of those "Thars only tree operatin sysumz in the werld, Winders and Linooks an dat frewtee Apple shitz". You think all computers are Wintel boxes with a graphics card for your games and a DVD burner for your porn? This is supposed to be a tech site, but instead we're infested with you consumer crap buyers, you think "building a system" means plugging in your nVidia card.

Not worried about the presence of IE10...

[jmerlin]

I'm really worried about how it's presented.

For the first time a user boots into a fresh copy of windows 8 (think a non-technical person), they'll be greeted with a Metro style interface. Now say they want to go browse a website. They do it from within metro, as if Windows 8 is completely integrated with "the web" -- the entire UI suddenly gives way to the website you wanted to view. From their perspective, they aren't actually using a web browser, it's just the OS going to the page they wanted. In this case, would (again, non-technical) people be able to discern the fact that they're browsing with IE10? That's just while using the metro UI. I think it's utter garbage (as does everyone I know) and so let's move into disable-this-shit-immediately-land.

So non-technical person dislikes the stupidly unusable and painfully tablet-and-phone-friendly metro UI. When they do start -> run and type in a URL or find a web browser icon on their desktop, is it going to just launch IE10? Is there no choice here? So the user still has to actually go download a new browser to displace IE? I'm sure there's some portion of less-than-well-educated and less-than-technical users who will not fully comprehend why they should do this or that they can do this. Maybe that number is somewhere around 40-45% of computer owners?

I'm not so worried about IE10 being an integral part of the OS (it's required for metro, but IMHO, metro is a piece of shit and should not be shipped with Windows 8 anyway), but I am worried about how web browsing is presented to users. If the OS completely assumes the user wants to use IE, and that user has to go out of his/her way to use another browser, it feels like a monopoly. I'd really prefer something like a EU-sanctioned requirement be put into Windows 8. When starting for the first time (after an OEM reset as well), it should ask you if you want to use Metro or the "classic" UI (if it doesn't ask this, I'm going to rage, seriously, I don't want to have to figure out how to turn that shit off when I install windows 8), and then it should ask you which web browser you want to use, and Windows 8 should fetch the latest version of whatever browser I specify, install it, and .. let me emphasize here: MAKE IT THE DEFAULT BROWSER AS WELL AS DISABLING THE FEATURE IN IE THAT SAYS "I AM NOT UR DEFAULT BROWSER /wrist". Is thinking about the customer and fairness just too much to ask from Microsoft? The sooner we can get the average users to stop using IE, the sooner we don't have to have if/elses all over our framework code just to make it run on IE.

That makes at least TWO STRIKES ...

[Jerry]

First comes the "catch-22" game Microsoft is playing with the PC OEMS against the consumers: Microsoft claims that it is up the the PC OEM to disable EUFI so that their PCs can boot and/or install the Linux OS. The PC OEMs claim that without EUFI enabled they can't get Microsoft Win8 certification. We all know that PC profit margins are razor thin, so Microsoft's "ad rebates" often make the difference between profits or not.

Now comes this in-your-face violation of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act:
sales on the condition that (A) the buyer or lessee not deal with the competitors of the seller or lessor ("exclusive dealings") or (B) the buyer also purchase another different product ("tying") but only when these acts substantially lessen competition (Act Section 3, codified at 15 U.S.C. 14

Now that the US government is essentially a cartel run by corporate interests who reside as heads of the various Federal agencies, the chances that the DOJ or the SEC will do anything about PC OEMs requiring that users also purchase Windows as a condition of the sale of the PC are moot. If not, they would have acted on that problem during the first trial, when it was even more blatant and part of contracts Microsoft made PC OEMs sign. Now, as I mentioned before, Microsoft forces PC OEMs to abide by its wishes merely with the threat of no ad rebates or refusing to issue a Winddows certification for the devices.

IF you were operating under the delusion that Microsoft had abandon its evil ways ... welcome to the same old world.

So why isn't apple just as guilty?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get IE on my iPhone or FF or Chrome, nope only Safari and everything based around it? Pot meet kettle.

NO longer that big a deal...

[Ariake Shikima]

Are we really going to get upset about this? Where is the rage from Mac owners that Safari is tied to the Apple OSX? Why is this only directed at Microsoft?

Windows 7 never let you uninstall IE either.

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't seem to get this.

When you "uninstalled" IE from Windows 7, all it did was remove the relevant shortcuts in the start menu, delete a few registry keys (mostly associates to the executable), then blow away the *.exe.

The actual DLL and libraries that are -critical- to the operation of Windows remained. Erasing those would/will cause all sorts of havoc around the system, most notably missing icons, broken control panels, etc.

I used to work with Windows XP Embedded extensively. That was around the same time that I learned just how deep IE was intertwined into XP. We literally could not get an Explorer UI to fire up properly without having the IE support libraries installed in the embedded image. Windows 7 is mostly the same. Just because it lets you uninstall IE doesn't mean it's blowing away the entire thing.

In Windows 8, they just removed that option entirely. So now you have like 15mb of stuff lying around your disk drive. Whoopie, deal with it. FF or Opera is always free to suck up the file associations from IE, and you can remove it from your start menu if you really want.

-AC

Different times

[Anonymous Coward]

We live in a time when a company that use to be run by an asshole (luckily he died) has not only provided a default browser, but completely forbidden you to install any other browser. Or any flash player. Or any other media player.

Antitrust my ass. Microsoft is an angel with wings compared to Apple.