Praise and jubilations, the monster is dead: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8524019.stm
Well in Europe anyway.
Well in Europe anyway.
The end of IE is at hand...
- Thread starter @Li3n
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Probably not since the amount of sales difference is rather huge. It's hard to have a monopoly when you only have less than 10% of the market.
W
wana10
this is such massive bullshit...microsoft should have gone with their first idea and just shipped without any web browser at all.
K
Kitty Sinatra
And does this mean that Linux distros have to offer a choice, too?
I've never quite understood why this was ever an issue. I mean Microsoft could have just incorporated web page viewing as an intrinsic part of Windows Explorer - as just another function of the OS itself - and it'd be just another feature of what you were purchasing.
Will they now have to offer a choice for the firewalls, the archiving, CD burning and the whole host of other functions the OS has that 3rd party companies also produce software for. MS Paint, textpad, wordpad, solitaire. The list is long. What's so different about a browser?
I've never quite understood why this was ever an issue. I mean Microsoft could have just incorporated web page viewing as an intrinsic part of Windows Explorer - as just another function of the OS itself - and it'd be just another feature of what you were purchasing.
Will they now have to offer a choice for the firewalls, the archiving, CD burning and the whole host of other functions the OS has that 3rd party companies also produce software for. MS Paint, textpad, wordpad, solitaire. The list is long. What's so different about a browser?
I never got the fuzz about this. Look at Firefox, it managed to gather quite a bit of the market before this new rule was even thought of. Make a decent enough program and people will eventually switch.
Aside from this whole thing being silly, the only thing this will change is that Windows won't have the IE.exe link on your start menu. I'm quite sure the actual process is so weaved into the OS that it'll in fact still be there in one form or another.
Aside from this whole thing being silly, the only thing this will change is that Windows won't have the IE.exe link on your start menu. I'm quite sure the actual process is so weaved into the OS that it'll in fact still be there in one form or another.
figmentPez
Staff member
None of the other programs you've listed have sought to force the industry to adopt Microsoft's standards. It's not just that IE was common, it was that IE didn't comply to standards, and sites that look right on IE can look very very wrong on other browsers. Not only that but many banking and other secure sites required Internet Explorer to use, leaving Linux (and sometimes even Mac) without a way to access those sites. Microsoft was using this to their advantage, trying to force people to use Windows because IE on Windows was, and still is sometimes, the only way to access certain web pages.
---------- Post added at 09:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:16 PM ----------
Actually not. Firefox had very low market share when the first unbundling laws were forced on Microsoft. This is just the latest of many restrictions that Europe has placed on Microsoft, dating back to early in the life of Windows XP. These laws have been in the works for a long time, since just after the IE/Netscape wars were mucking up the web with incompatible standards.
The net savvy would know about Firefox and know how to choose between browsers, but other people might not. I'm sure many of us have helped friends or relatives with computer problems before, the people who click on banner ads telling them they might have a virus and install whatever it tells them to. They use IE because it's there, and it works for them. There are a lot of these people.
Necronic
Staff member
I don't like it when people are protected from themselves. Its not like firefox is that unknown. The only argument I can see for doing this is that by distributing the market share more it will make hackers lives more difficult as they won't be able to hit 90% of the market by focusing on one system. Ironically this will also probably make our browsing experience on Chrome/FF/Opera less safe as well, but c'est la vie.
Or they might be stubborn, lazy summabitches who use IE out of inertia even if you installed FF on their laptops...
Go into any non-ie window and type a url in it... see what happens.
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wana10
in older windows it would become a ie window and browse to that url, in win7 it opens your default browser and goes to that url. probably because of this sort of mess microsoft has put some layers between explorer and internet-explorer.
If you'd bothered reading the OP you would see that instead of removing it they made it so you're given a choice between then instead of removing anything... which is why we're better then you yanks.
figmentPez
Staff member
And if the net savvy can't choose because the internet only works with Internet Explorer? As little as 4 or 5 years ago that was a major problem. My bank still only allowed IE for online transactions. My college only supported IE for online classes and tests. Many government sites only supported IE for many feature. Including the websites FEMA used for victims of Hurricane Katrina to register for aid. Computers running Windows had configuration problems, and those had to be worked out before they could be used. Bootable Linux CDs made the computers work, but the website didn't allow any non-IE browsers.
Without the threat of Europe completely banning the sale of Windows (this legislation is not the first forced on Microsoft) it's hard to say if changes to browser compatibility would have happened.
Considering that Phoenix (later Firebird, later Firefox) didn't even enter public testing until 2002, and IE wasn't even integrated into Windows until XP in 2001, I'm a little confused why you chose 1996 as a year for your attempted humor. 1996 was before the effective death of Netscape as a browser, and the impending reign of IE as a dominant force in restrictive standards.
I think the argument that Microsoft shouldn't control the web is pretty compelling. Thankfully change has happened, and it's a rare site that only works in IE, but I don't think Microsoft should be able to work, unrestricted, towards a goal of having major websites only work with the Windows version of IE.
doomdragon6
Staff member
I like IE. :3
Pls don't leave your house, people in white coats will be over soon...
J
JCM
I think they have been working on this since 1996. Nothing like a dozen national gov'ts and one of the largest companies in the world to get something done fast.
There are still that small band that will only give up IE when you pry it from their cold, dead hands.
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