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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (16365)	1/19/1998 8:14:00 PM
From: Larry Sullivan	Respond to of 24154

Some integration items I have noticed from using IE3 and now IE4. IE3 and maybe prior versions. Microsoft added some "widgets" to allow all developers to have access to coolbars etc. though an updated common control dll. 2 dlls were added to allow all developers to use simplified internet fucntions from either straight C/C++ (Win32) or via a COM interface. There may be others like the ability to type techstocks.com in the <start><run> menu and have it bring up your default web browser. Only reason I think that this might be an integration thing and not a file extension addition is that by the extension mapping this would be a .com file yet it recognized that this was an URL. IE4 More common control additions Extension of navigation stack to standard explorer windows (non internet viewing of local and intranet files/directories and such) so that you can do back and forward etc...This is really cool if you are hopping around network drives. The basic explorer window is now a real browser both of local and web data and the ability to view all explorer windows and the desktop as web pages. Extension of single click metaphor (if you want) to all of Windows. These are just ones I have found using the products or documented in the Internet SDK, Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ). There are others but I think that these are enough to show how Microsoft integrated the browser and the OS/Shell. Again my $.02 Larry...

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (16365)	1/20/1998 12:14:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Hello Daniel, Ok ... I'll bite ... Does anybody know what "integrating the browser with the OS" really means? I've posted plenty of times what I thought. The browser has a COM interface, and it can be called to display stuff from other programs. That is, it's "integrated with the OS" just like Word or Excel. I'd guess there's also a bunch of stuff in the various little utilities that constitute the GUI for the OS that generated the html. You can call it OS code if you want, I guess you can call everything in the bunch of the software that comes on the Windows disk OS code if you want, but it all runs at the application level, like Word and Excel, too. Of course, code is the wrong word these days too, now it's all "technology". As I have observed the evolution of the browser, what has occurred is a cobbling to gether of functionality into a very large application. With the newest generations of browsers the vendors have started to try and modularize their code more and more. If you really look at what a browser is, it is a combination of functions, some of which I agree should be a part of the OS. For example, http (the primary protocol used to access web servers) is just a file access protocol. That means that it's really no different from how your OS accesses files on your hard drive. Likewise, if you were on a corporate network, you are probably using SMB, NCP, or NFS protocols to access files. These are protocols developed by Microsoft, Novell and Sun respectivly and are built into your OS in Windows (I'm not sure if NFS is included for free ...) Why shouldn't http be for free? Another example is the concept of your browser understanding that when you type "http://some.thing.what" it means to use the http protocol to request the default file from a web site called some.thing.what ... so "integration" concepts (and Microsoft) say that this also should just be a part of the OS. And when browsers developed the concepts of "back" and "forward" and "home", some folks at Microsoft realized that these should also be a part of the OS ... it doesn't matter whether you were using the Internet or not ... if you want to go back to the last thing you were looking at, you should be able to. This might have been a local file, or an Excel spreadsheet. So what's left ... displaying (or rendering) HTML data. Well if I use WordPad, it is able to display files that are of numerous types ... why shouldn't I be able to add HTML to the list? If WordPad can read and write HTML, and can open a file that is at a URL, then I almost have a crude browser. This is a very crude example, but Microsoft has started to understand that many of the concepts of a browser can be applied to anything ... and they want to "integrate" these features into the OS so that access to files, of any type, from any source, can be accessed in a consistant manner. System level stuff, the core OS kernel, the stuff that runs in system mode in the microprocessor and has access to memory mapping and the device registers, yup, you gotta be careful with that, that code screws up and your machine crashes or hangs. Which is why I tend to get annoyed with Windows 95, I figure that something that gets screwed up and can be fixed by reformat, reinstall must be something wrong with the OS. The way operating systems are supposed to work, anything running at app level can kill itself, but it shouldn't kill the machine. But we aren't there yet. I can kill a Win95 or NT machine by just changing a Registry setting. (The Reg is a small configuration database that Microsoft uses.) I can also kill either OS with a user application ... there are many that you can download from the 'net. I'll even read something from www.microsoft.com, if it actually explains things and doesn't go off into purest marketese like the DNS/DNA stuff that's floating around these days. Integrated is just a word, and like most words in the Microsoft context it's a bit problematic pinning down what it means. Near as I can tell, integrated, bundled, tied are all pretty equivalent, but I'll accept correction. No, I would agree with your definition. It's a very hazy area ... And it will only get worse! My analysis and beliefs are that everything filters down to silicon. Which means that as we learn more and more about the OS, it will be solidified into well designed algorithms and implemented (or integrated?) in silicon by Intel! > Cheers, Dan. Scott C. Lemon