Windows 7 to be shipped in Europe without Internet Explorer Microsoft has announced that it will ship a special version of Vista's successor in Europe, titled Windows 7 E, without Internet Explorer 8. The browser-less version, a reaction to an antitrust investigation by the EU into whether Microsoft is abusing its dominant position with Windows and Internet Explorer, will be distributed in all member nations of the European Economic Area as well as Croatia and Switzerland. Windows 7 E is reminiscent of media-player-free Windows XP N and Windows Vista N, which Microsoft offered in Europe also in response to an EU antitrust investigation. Unlike the N versions, which proved to be very unsuccessful—as Europeans simply purchased the full retail versions and OEMs refused to include them on their systems—Microsoft is not planning to offer a version of Windows 7 in Europe that includes IE8. This means that none of the versions of Windows 7 sold in Europe will include Microsoft's browser. [Read More] - [Read Insanenutters Blog Response - Has the EU gone too far?]
This will sure help me stop clients from using Internet Explorer. Removing spyware every month because of their browser habits gets very annoying.
In Vista and Windows 7 IE basically runs in a sand box if UAC is turned on which appears to help significantly, no matter what browser people use it’s not going to stop them downloading exe files full of spyware and other nasties though.
Yeah obviously curbing their dodgy habits helps a lot. But the whole issue with people using internet explorer is that they generally don't let it update, and keep documented security holes open, now I know UAC helps control these things, but I don't know anyone with vista who kept UAC turned on. Plus, I'd rather they just went with the browser with much less spyware, if they continue getting spyware with firefox I can just install noscript and tell them to only enable scripts on very important sites.
The European union basically thinks shipping windows with a web browser and media player is making Microsoft anti competitive. Trouble is the Eu is getting away with it which means there gonna ask for more and more and more features to be removed.
It seems pretty reasonable to me. The Media Player part is more to do with the codecs than the software itself, there are various legal issues involved with releasing certain codecs. Plus losing that and Internet Explorer 8 is no big deal, they're both pretty lame pieces of software anyway.
Until Windows 7 Windows has only really shipped with MP3 and Windows Media Codec support out the box. The Eu has a problem with media player its self, its apparently anti competitive towards real player and other such players. I would personally choose Windows Media Player over the competition anyway (real player, itunes and so on) I don’t use it as my modded xbox plays all my media and I have Winamp / Media Player Classic for anything i do actually watch on the PC. My main concern is the Eu are going to want more and more ripped out of Windows, what’s next? Windows Media Centre, Remote Desktop?
My thoughts exactly. If they want more and more ripped out of Windows, it almost leads one to think what is the point of it all? Hopefully the Eu won't want much more taken out of Windows.
it's kind of a weird thing going on. i had no idea that windows was shipped anywhere with restrictions put in place by governments or government states/organizations. it might just be a show of power, because microsoft still has a huge monopoly. they had a bunch of lawsuits in the '90s here in the US, but all that came out of it was a fine paid by microsoft (the fine was in the hundreds of millions, but it was still small change for MS). btw, if they use Google's strategy to gain popularity with the new MS search engine (the commercials [or adverts as theyre known elsewhere] are pretty good), then they will wipe google out. google used to be ad free, thats why it became so popular. then when all the ad-driven search engines were unpopular, google opened up to ad's (google stock opened at $30 a share, closed at $330 a share the first day, and i dont think its dropped much under $300 since. they set records). its not like MS is going to lose money by not including these programs. dont you need MS Internet Explorer (or an IE add-on to another browser) to recieve windows updates?
If Microsoft went back to taking the approach they did in Windows 98 in which you chose the features to install, the EU might not be so upset. The lack of choice in having Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player installed is very annoying.
Right this morning, I booted up my Firefox browser and got a random XML error message, and the browser wouldn't load. I had to load up Internet Explorer and google up the problem and found a fix. Problem solved. Now what if I didnt have IE and only Firefox at this point? Then it would have been a mad panic trying to find a way to download a new copy of Firefox. I guess my point is, its useful for the OS to have a built in browser for situations just like these.