Bearded One, you're getting into one of these "context" problems. There was an NYT article from a few months back, about "integration" and "modularity", and how Microsoft will claim whichever is advantageous to the business plan in any particular situation. I occasionally allude back to with the ironic "it's so modular, it's integrated!", or vice versa. My between the lines reading during the tortured consent decree proceedings was that IE wasn't badly designed ( in terms of arbitrary entanglement with the system), as I had once thought. There's probably some lumping stuff together in dll's that shouldn't be, but that problem could be easily fixed.
Of course, no matter how "modular" IE is, invoking the code in different contexts will lead to interactions you wouldn't see if it were "just a browser", and that could lead to odd consequences. There were also stories about how IE5 was going to be more concise, less bloated. Who knows, I don't know if anybody outside of Microsoft can really say what goes on. Somebody point me to some (current) references on how Windows really works, internally, I'd go off and read up on it. There was ntinternals.com, but first they got censored, then they got their domain name lawyerized out of existence. Leave the lawyers out of it! the Microsofties cry. Hahaha.
Looking back at your message, though, there is a basic problem with "integration", that is, the intentional blurring of application and system code. Apps should be apps, they can mess themselves up but they shouldn't be capable of messing up anything else. Depending on what "integrated with the OS" means, that may not be the case with IE. If nothing else, it's bizarre that if you install IE4, installing IE3 on top of it will hose your system.
Cheers, Dan. |
