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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.
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
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.
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 Because Microsoft do not publish the specs for these libraries, crafting replacements that ONLY have the bits needed for the rest of the system to function is almost impossible.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)
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.
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".
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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.
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.
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'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Bundled yes, integrated as part of the core system, no.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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?
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".
Rethinking email
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)
rm -rf /Applications/Safari.app
done.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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?
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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?
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)
No it isn't. The Intel Binary Compatibility Standard unifies all of that.
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)
Personally I would like to see MS become more like Apple and encourage healthy competition, whilst not participating in anti competitive behavior. wait...