This is the same confusion that Judge Jacka-- had. Do this experiment - take a look at the size of iexplore.exe - its less than 80K for IE5. That's because the bulk of the implementation of IE (interpreting/displaying HTML in an arbitrary window) is part of the OS.
Now, try this. Send yourself some email that contains HTLM, and view it using Outlook Express or Outlook. Or, check out some of the newer help files like the ones that come in MSDN. You don't suppose that everyone is sitting around developing an HTML parsing/rendering engine, do you? No! Rather, they call into the Operating System with a request - here's a window, and here's an HTML file, please render, and voila. By putting this rendering support in the OS, MSFT is making it very easy to make apps Internet Aware.
The browser itself is an extremely thin app - all it does is present you with some icons for managing favorites, connections, etc., and an edit box to type in URLs. Then, it puts the requests together and calls into the OS to render the HTML to the window.
When Judge Jacka-- discovered that "IE could be uninstalled in 30 seconds", all he discovered is that the thin wrapper can be uninstalled. What can't be uninstalled without breaking a huge number of apps is the support for the HTML rendering.
This is exactly what they did for the stupid-ass injunction. They disabled all of IE per the Judge's orders, and ofcourse, a whole bunch of apps including the shell broke, because they couldn't find the DLLs necessary to load.
I fail to understand why this entire point was lost in the trial. |
