Microsoft confirms the death of Internet Explorer

groze said:

I actually used 98lite, and it did leave no traces of Internet explorer

And you know this how? Just because you didn't see an icon? Just because you couldn't run any programs that needed ie? There's a lot more in IE than just that, and removal of IE would have required removing pieces of many other components, which didn't happen. What you, or the author of 98lite felt was "good enough" to remove IE would not have met the courts definition of removal.

What's more, it "removed" it by installing Windows 95 versions of things like Explorer. So if you're going to do that, why not just Run Windows 95? It's no longer Windows 98.

groze said:

It is unclear what it means to "remove IE"

Yet somehow you feel qualified to know "there were no traces"?

groze said:

it means they don't know very simple to figure out.

Yet, somehow you can figure it out.... right?

Yes, you will find lots of articles, written by Microsoft haters, who all want to believe that Microsoft lied, so they will believe ANYONE that claims they can prove MS wrong, despite the "proof" being stupid things like replacing all the file with Windows 95 versions... How exactly is that Uninstalling IE?

I find clicking on the Chrome icon rather than the IE icon works for me. Probably you could click on the FearFox and that would work too.

Hope that helps someone else.

This is blasphemy! This is madness!

BunnyJ, and Mystere

I have been using computers for a very long time.


Yes, I never said Wikipedia was reliable or not reliable. You are just assuming that. You are basically calling other sites that have the same info incorrect. I can totally understand if it was just from Wikipedia. I said I couldn't find those site because it is gone or the news is very old and I didn't want to waste my time proving my point.

Remember, Techs are like Mechanics they never agree. I even created my own backup program using pkdos file and a floppy boot disk for windows 98se. I know a little BASIC. Yes, I feel qualified in saying no traces of internet explorer was left after using 98lite removal that also includes removal of desktop integration. Just for info you could install Internet explorer 3 or at least I was able to do it.

As far as 98lite, the version of I had, you can see all of its operation it doesn't hide. You can even unzip and look at. I do know I little BASIC program. I even helped out with configuration problems when I was younger at the library and it was an apple computer.


Guess what MSE and others detect 98lite as a virus. I still have it on my flash drive.

Lee said:

. . .again mythical B.S. . . .

Did you mean this entire thread, I wonder?... I can assure you that my post contains nothing "mythical" at all... (If I misconstrued your post, my sincere apologies...but, doggone it, please use the quote function in the future as it makes it so much easier to see what's being discussed as well as what isn't.)

BillyBob said:

I hated Netscape, it made my computers almost unworkable and I always had the latest PCs, at least IE was reasonably light, just buggy.

Netscape was shipping Navigator for years before Microsoft wrote the first line of code for IE, let alone shipped it--in those days if you wanted a mainstream browser, Navigator was by far the most used and proliferated at the time. Indeed, after Microsoft shipped the first version of IE I ran versions of Navigator/Communicator in parallel alongside it, and constantly compared the two (I'm amazed at how much *energy* I had in those days...) IMO, at the time, it was not until Microsoft hit IE 6.x that it began to overtake Navigator/Communicator in terms of feature support and quality. After that, I watched in stupefaction as Netscape pretty much simply stopped developing, stopped competing and IE kept right on developing, pedal to the metal, so to speak. Microsoft has pulled the "tortoise and the hare" trick several times in its history (Microsoft being the tortoise, of course)...and it's been amusing to see it play out right in front of me.

In those days, Netscape's founder (Andresson?) was fond of announcing to the world how Netscape's browsers were going to "obsolete" computer operating systems like Windows...! He never got around to explaining exactly how Netscape's browsers might do that without becoming OSes themselves, or the irony that Netscape's huge market share advantage at the time IE entered the market was Netscape's *Windows*-based client market share...

Ah, "the good old days" were never really actually all that "good"...

Mystere said:

You're misrepresenting both what Microsoft said, and what the regulators were doing. Or at least misunderstanding it.

What the regulators wanted was for Microsoft to magically just "uninstall" IE from the current version of Windows without breaking anything. That couldn't be done because IE was completely integrated into the OS, and doing so meant crippling the OS in the process. *AT THAT TIME*.
...

At the time the argument was so insane (that IE had to be uninstalled in order not to use it) that it was easy to see it had come from the mind of a political bureaucrat and not from the mind of someone conversant with how Windows works--a software professional, in other words. It was never, ever necessary to "uninstall" IE not to use it... As I mentioned in an earlier post, I did it for years with Netscape's browsers--they ran side-by-side and IE being installed didn't slow down Navigator/Communicator even a tiny little bit, or vice-versa...Hah-ha...even then I thought the idea was preposterous! It's like "Microsoft Paint", for instance...You don't need to uninstall it in order to install any commercial Windows paint program you care to. The presence/absence of Microsoft's Paint does not in any way restrict or otherwise impede the running of any other commercial painting program, etc. Ditto browsers--always has been that way.

What slowed down the earlier versions of Windows--and really this remains true all the way through Windows 7 at least--was the number of programs installed--the more installed, the larger the registry, the more icons to position and display, etc., the *slower* the computer would get in a boot. Up to a point, of course... Even today if you boot a Win7 installation that has just been installed with no 3rd-party programs added yet, and you compare the boot time to a Win7 box of equal specs but several years' worth of applications installed--the newer Windows 7 install will smoke the older one--but it's all because of the way Windows works when you begin installing a lot of applications--has little to nothing to do with *what* applications you're talking about--and *nothing* at all to do with the presence or absence of IE that I could/can see. The people who thought it "booted faster" without IE were no doubt looking at a fresh install of Windows with few if any 3rd-party programs installed and comparing it to a mature Windows installation with dozens of 3rd-party programs installed. But bureaucrats don't understand "finer points" like that, so naturally they reached the wrong conclusions. But like I mentioned to Groze...a lot of that was Microsoft's fault entirely. That "we can't uninstall IE" line was a prevarication--completely unnecessary--and fairly stupid, I thought--given that it was a matter of public record that IE began life as an entirely separate program, just like any other browser, including Netscape's.

To this day I think of the DoJ's craziness in the Microsoft kangaroo court of the period as an object lesson on why it's horrible advice to suggest that government bureaucrats should decide what programs people can run and what programs they can't. Simply horrible. People are perfectly capable of deciding such issues themselves.