Pulling The Plug On IE zdnet.com
Much loved ilk sister Mary Jo Foley here, but this isn't an opinion piece. Rather, straightforward technical discussion of what it means to remove IE, from the OEMs that love Bill so.
But hardware vendors have told DOJ representatives that it is relatively simple to remove IE files from the most recent, commercially available version of Windows 95, called OSR2. Microsoft shipped OSR2 to OEMs, original equipment manufacturers, in the fall of 1996 for preinstallation on new hardware.
But it's not something the poor sucker retail customers would want, is it?
The facility with which OEMs can remove IE 4.01 files from OSR2.5 -- the latest version of Windows 95, which Microsoft began delivering to OEMs last week -- is also at issue. OEMs said that removal of IE from the most up-to-date Windows 95 release is also fairly trivial.
"It's relatively easy to uninstall IE 4 in this release [OSR2.5]," said Dan Sigman, software marketing program manager at Unisys. Sigman noted that with OSR2.5, customers can easily add browsers from competitive vendors, as well.
But of course, something else is going on here.
One software developer working with the most recent Windows 95 releases, as well as with Windows 98 beta code, noted that with each Windows release, Microsoft is making it progressively more difficult to separate IE from the base operating system.
"Vast parts of Windows 98 use IE. If you took it out, it just wouldn't work," said the developer, who requested anonymity. "The Microsoft guys are going IE-wild, especially when it comes to including their version of HTML [MSHTML] in the operating system. They're making IE a necessary component through usage."
And this is a technically wise, in fact a necessity. Just like the technical lock aka monopolist death grip.
Cheers, Dan. |
