killadoob
Honorary Master
Yea fair point, not sure why microsoft does not just give in here and bundle them all or something. I see now though microsoft are the ones threatening to leave it out which will only hurt them if you ask me.
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Windows 7 and IE split concerns
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MielieSpoor
Expert Member
Well why should MS bundle other browsers? MS is a business, they don't need to. What Firefox do to enhance their market share is up to them. If Firefox can't enhance their market share on their own they should just dwindle off and die. MS was flamed because the budled IE, and now they don't bundle IE anymore. Whats the problem then?
Years back in the various antitrusts, MS claimed that it was not possible for users to roll-back to previous IE versions, and similiarly that it was impossible to uninstall it because it would damage critical links of other system apps and dependancies etc. They have made these claims under oath defending their cash cows.
Now they're shipping it without IE. hmm.
We knew they were lying the whole time, now hopefully a bright-eyed lawyer will rake them in for purgery too.
I cannot see how they can completely remove IE. Sure, iexplore.exe might not be there in the EU version, but parts of it will still be there otherwise many apps will break.
Say for instance I am writing an app which must display a web page to the user. This could be a mapping program (making use of Google Maps or Live Maps) or an app which simply displays portions of my website, like Steam. Would I need to write my own browser to do so? My own HTML parser, my own JavaScript engine? No. Microsoft has made it incredibly easy for developers to reuse the IE browser in our own apps and many apps today use it.
The nice thing about the IE components being there on every windows install is that I (as a developer) need not worry about cross browser compatibility issues. I do not need to write twice the amount of code so that my app works in every browser. I do not need to install every browser out there and test every piece of functionality in my app in every browser. I need not worry about redistributing a browser with my app. When the user installs my app, it just works.
A while back I read that Mozilla was heading in the same direction - making their browser reusable. I haven't researched it much, but maybe ISVs will start making use of Mozilla's browser as well. Hey...maybe when you download an app in the future, it might say as part of the system requirements that Firefox needs to be installed
Anyway...the base IE components need to be there otherwise many apps which depend on these components will simply not work.
bekdik
Honorary Master
I don't see how MS can bundle some one else's product! They have no rights to Opera.
An Acer, HP or Lenova could bundle a product, provided they could reach some agreement with the supplier.
In the same vein, how many motor manufacturers give you a choice of shock absorbers when you purchase a car?
Thank MS for that. They destroyed the competition and introduced their own non-standard HTML specs. Their almost 100% PC penetration meant automatically that the same warped standards would be applied to their browsers and most websites would have to conform to IE.
Yeah it's easier for you NOW, but if you read what developers were saying 5 years ago and prior to that, you'd hear something quite opposite, MS brought IE with its rendering engine which was not obeying the specifications which cause a lot of frustration to many people.
MS created a false IE monopoly. They bribed and threatened their way to be the sole OS provider for mainstream PCs, then used that to make IE the sole browser. Now it's UNDO time. It's too little and too late, but it is something.
MS is a monopoly and gets special treatment. If MS doesn't like it and would rather no make business in the EU - they're welcome to F-off. It's in Microsoft's best interests to obey the governments of the EU - the same way you and I must obey the SA government - if they don't - they can get the heck out and take a 30% cut on earnings. I'm sure the ASEAN states would follow as would the AU as many governments are already going open source to save money (US State governments for example.).
I never had to do that under DOS, Win 3.1 or 95 or NT.
I never heard of anyone who had to do that under OS/2.
My father ran high end CAD packages on SUN SParc machines in various configurations in the 80s and early 90s, he never had to do any of that.
PCs were a commodity already with the Apple, Xerox, Amiga and others. My primary school had BBC computers to teach kids stuff. Design houses ran on SUN UltraSPARC workstations using various flavours of UNIX/IAX, as did hospital CAT and MRI scanners. MS DOS ran
well itself as did PC DOS and then DR DOS. Apple was ahead with their GUI and XEROX pre-ceeded them.
I would say quite the opposite. It's MS version of Windows which requires basic users to be IT experts with the jargon thrown into error messages, with necessary installs of firewalls, anti-virus software and registry cleanup ups.
Have you used Mac OSX? Well try it and you'll see how much user friendlier that is, without any jargon and without having to take a crash course in computers in order to do anything functional.
You'll find that end users suffer far more from the Windows GUI (stealing focus for example) than from having to click 2-3 times on a Wizard at SETUP time.
No-one moans that you have to fill in the serial number and details each time you setup. No-one moans that Windows Setup sometimes proceeds for 30 minutes before telling you it can't install on a particular configuration. I'm sure people won't moan about a little Wizard with 2-3 clicks. No-one will suffer, don't worry.
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I believe that Trident, the HTML rendering engine will still be there. But yeah, thank MS from the 90s for that. There is absolutely no reason why an INTERNET BROWSER should be so deeply integrated into an OS. It's like integrating your telephone into every system of your house so that if a plumber or a carpenter wants to do something he has to call the Telkom guy out to throw a switch.
I think you'll find that the US DOJ discovere that Microsoft LIED about that back then. An ordinary Joe would have been thrown in JAIL for contempt of court and perjury, however, if you're a big corporation with lots of money to throw at politicians, you can get away with it.
I agree with you. I myself hated earlier versions of IE for their non-compliance to standards. It was (and to a degree still is) a nightmare. But standards compliance is not what I was trying to point out in my post, nor was it IE as a browser. It was the parts of IE which cannot be removed from the Windows OS.
If I create a web page and I know that the only browser that was ever going to view it was IE (because of the way my app is designed), then that makes life a lot easier. By using the IE components, I am guaranteed that the rendering engine being used in my app is IE. Remember, I am not necessarily talking about public facing internet sites here.
Take the windows help viewer app for example. It uses IE to render help files which are stored locally on the user's machine. It does not require the user interface of IE, but it does require IE's renderer.
Say for instance Mozilla offers a few .dlls which include their JavaScript engine, renderer, etc. My app could make use of these dlls and again I would be offered the simplicity of coding for just one browser. Those dlls would be a subset of the browser - I wouldn't need the user interface, history or favourites of Firefox.
As it so happens, many apps depend on the subset of IE which is part of every Windows installation and removing that subset would break a lot of apps. Is that Microsoft's fault? Maybe, because of their dominance. Who ultimately chose to re-use IE's capabilities in their own apps? It's the third party software vendors. Why did they choose IE? Because Microsoft made it so simple for them to use.
Edit:
Here's a link showing some apps that use IE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)
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Empiricism Philosopher
Expert Member
Use windows xp to download firefox for w7 and save it on a usb, format, install windows 7.
bekdik
Honorary Master
Then you never worked on TCP/IP networks. It was common practice to have to set up drivers such as Clarkeson's TCP/IP. Even with Netware one got seriously involved in setting up driver stacks.
With DOS and early Windows one often had to do a lot of work in setting up printers, especially when dealing with fledgling word processing packages and getting printers to handle proportional spacing.
With pretty much all plugin cards it was up to the user to set up interrupts, DMA and memory settings on the card and also in the driver.
Because YOU never had to do it doesn't mean it wasn't a requirement.
Tsimo
Well-Known Member
the fact is that MS has made a superior product. now before every linux fan or mac monkey out there start crying buckets you have to look at it from a standard users point of view. you start it up the first time and you answer a few questions and you go. it works. look at what happened with the xp version without any Media player that MS assembled for the EU. it sold some stupid amount of copies that did not even cover the costs of creating the disks.
also Ms cant bundle all the other browsers in its OS. will they next have to provide secutiry updates to these browsers as well? and who gets blamed if someones PC gets hacked via one of these 3rd party browsers. i read somewhere that software companies may be held liable in the future for security vulnrebilities in the code. now if MS bundles the Software a standard user will expect them to assure the safety and integrity of the software. i think this whole thing is a nice way of finding a big target and jumping on it. when will the EU start looking at Apple and the linux community. linux comes bundled with every product you need. if MS did that they would be nailed up before the EU commissioners door before the internet even got wind of it.
also Ms cant bundle all the other browsers in its OS. will they next have to provide secutiry updates to these browsers as well? and who gets blamed if someones PC gets hacked via one of these 3rd party browsers. i read somewhere that software companies may be held liable in the future for security vulnrebilities in the code. now if MS bundles the Software a standard user will expect them to assure the safety and integrity of the software. i think this whole thing is a nice way of finding a big target and jumping on it. when will the EU start looking at Apple and the linux community. linux comes bundled with every product you need. if MS did that they would be nailed up before the EU commissioners door before the internet even got wind of it.
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
Microsoft have no excuse.
IBM did it with OS/2 Warp v4 when it was released - they put an icon on the desktop with which you can download Netscape Navigator for OS/2. OS/2 shipped with a web browser, WebExplorer/2 IIRC, but TBH, it was a very basic web browser.
They also included a lot of links with which you can download extra software for OS/2 whenever you want to - or just to browse the links.
So M$ can put a couple of links on Windows7's desktop, with which users can download the browser(s) of their choice.
IBM did it with OS/2 Warp v4 when it was released - they put an icon on the desktop with which you can download Netscape Navigator for OS/2. OS/2 shipped with a web browser, WebExplorer/2 IIRC, but TBH, it was a very basic web browser.
They also included a lot of links with which you can download extra software for OS/2 whenever you want to - or just to browse the links.
So M$ can put a couple of links on Windows7's desktop, with which users can download the browser(s) of their choice.
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
*cough*
and viruses do love windows... why do you need tons of 3rd party applications just to ensure windows remains virus/trojan/worm free?
A basic Linux install doesn't require any antivirus/antispyware whatsoever and is very hard to infect.
Sorry, but your argument does not hold water. We recently had a lovely new worm which is undetectable by most of the antivirus/spyware packages, and which requires a complete Windows reinstall once it infects a PC.
I am at the stage where I don't trust any Windows, or Microsoft software anymore. Too vulnerable to malware.
Ubuntu also requires a few questions to be answered, and installs itself without any serious babysitting, and most modern Linux OS'es is the same - very easy to install.
Should you install Ubuntu/OpenSuSE/Mandriva to any existing Windows laptop/desktop, the installer program will detect Windows, and ask you whether you'll want to wipe it (I heartily recommend this) or shrink the Windows partition and install Ubuntu/OpenSuSE/Mandriva on the new partition.
However, should you want to install Windows to an existing Linux desktop/laptop, then you'll have an uphill battle as you'll have to manually partition the HDD, and shrink the partitions.
And can you run Windows off a live CD (and I'm not speaking of BartPE here) to recover valuable data in the event of an OS crash?
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I am Penguin
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And before everyone "lives happily ever after", mostly everyone will first download IExplorer and then everyone willl complain why it was not bundled with Windows in the first place. Leaving IE out of windows will make absolutely very little if any difference in the percentage of windows users using IE. All these f@@ls want is to make money and what easier way are there than fining Microsoft. We all should complain why I do not have the choices I want or need bundled within Linux. Oh dear, I forgot, thats free and there is no one to fine.
I cannot see how they can completely remove IE. Sure, iexplore.exe might not be there in the EU version, but parts of it will still be there otherwise many apps will break.
Say for instance I am writing an app which must display a web page to the user. This could be a mapping program (making use of Google Maps or Live Maps) or an app which simply displays portions of my website, like Steam. Would I need to write my own browser to do so? My own HTML parser, my own JavaScript engine? No. Microsoft has made it incredibly easy for developers to reuse the IE browser in our own apps and many apps today use it.
The nice thing about the IE components being there on every windows install is that I (as a developer) need not worry about cross browser compatibility issues. I do not need to write twice the amount of code so that my app works in every browser. I do not need to install every browser out there and test every piece of functionality in my app in every browser. I need not worry about redistributing a browser with my app. When the user installs my app, it just works.
A while back I read that Mozilla was heading in the same direction - making their browser reusable. I haven't researched it much, but maybe ISVs will start making use of Mozilla's browser as well. Hey...maybe when you download an app in the future, it might say as part of the system requirements that Firefox needs to be installed
Anyway...the base IE components need to be there otherwise many apps which depend on these components will simply not work.
(agreed)
which is the middleware I was referring to in this sister thread: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=2873815#post2873815
(Middleware is the reason MS nuked Netscape and are so scared of Google, which is why they bundle IE so integrally.)
On that note: http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2266#tsb
The real problem, though, is not IE. It's the "internal/system HTML renderer", called explorer (oh, don't act so surprised!!
)They just slapped an "internet" infront of the name when they forked the project and gave it a gui for home users to use. Still the same core (to a large degree) and both versions are still installed anyway.
If the EC forced MS to allow users to choose which reuseable browser they prefer - THAT would be tops, because it would force MS and lazy developers into developing standards based sites. (true single declaration CSS would be attainable.)
... then when we logon to our internet banking with a non-IE browser, we'd see the buttons that we have to click on ... and when a user presses F1 they would still see their extentions in the help file. Imagine that: right-click and contextual search at dictionary.com for that term right from within the help file...
I have not worked on networks but to get internet on a Win 3.1 machine I had to install a TCP IP stack and the browser. I recall it was "Trumpet" in my case and it worked well with Netscape 1.
My response was also pretty general, in reference to any type of driver.
The EC is not forcing MS to remove Trident. I think they wanted MS to allow other browser front-end options - what MS uses internally for itself is not part of the equation - the way I understand it. MS instead removed IE.