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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."
IE's market share isn't what it used to be. Neither is Window's market share for that matter.
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.
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.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.