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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."
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 Because Microsoft do not publish the specs for these libraries, crafting replacements that ONLY have the bits needed for the rest of the system to function is almost impossible.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 small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
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.
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. :)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
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 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)
moox. for a new generation.
They did. In 1997. With Internet Explorer 4.
Every version of IE since has had the same architecture.