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

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 Because Microsoft do not publish the specs for these libraries, crafting replacements that ONLY have the bits needed for the rest of the system to function is almost impossible.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.