Comments

• Chips B Malroy

  2009-06-14 07:35:07

  I have to comment on this part: "Microsoft Announces It Will Ship Without IE in Europe - Reactions - Updated"
  
  So Roy, MS is taking a slightly different tack in strategy here with the EU, is what I noticed. It stopped with the endless delaying strategy, most likely only because it is ready to release Windows Seven soon Now it is looking to repeat the N strategy from previous EU decisions.
  
  At first look I think we agree that the decision, or rather the offer, to not include/bundle IE with Seven sounds great, but we just know that MS will strong arm the OEM's to include a IE disk, or to install IE themselves, making it about the same tactic as the N without WMP case.
  
  The "strong arming" of OEM's by MS in the past,has some documentation. Best example of this type of illegal behavior is MS charging IBM an extra $10 per OEM install because IBM was installing OS/2 on some of their systems for sale. If any company should have sued MS, it was IBM.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-06-14 07:42:07

  Dell was preinstalling Firefox on machines in the UK for a while (maybe it still does).

• Chips B Malroy

  2009-06-14 22:47:02

  One more comment, removing IE, Outlook, WMP, and Windows Messenger from XP Pro, completely, seem to make XP a whole lot more stable. Some of these middleware apps, like IE and Messenger, were doing things like spying on windows users. It could that and ActiveX (a part of IE mostly) be the reasons why these middleware apps, caused stability problems in XP and other windows versions? While windows will never be as stable as Linux (in my opinion), it can be better by getting rid of these very bad apps completely. I had never bought into the story by softies that IE still installed, but not the default and/or used browser, is not doing things behind the windows user's back.

• Chips B Malroy

  2009-06-14 07:45:12

  Also, as I was saying for a long time over on MS Watch, removing IE completely from XP, actually improved XP, and there was only a few programs that had to have it. Removing IE completely, improved the security of XP by a good factor as well, but it was still basically unsound. Removing the other windows malware targets of WMP, Outlook (2nd biggest malware target), windows messenger, in addition to IE, also helped. Setting up a limited user account in XP also helped, sadly it was nowhere as easy as Linux or Mac which came that way out of the box, so to say. While you could get XP a lot better secured, it will still be untrustworthy in the long run. Just too many pieces of malware, and malware also written to elevate the user privileges, out their on the web waiting to attack it.