5 ms·
"Their browser is too tied to the OS." During the debates surrounding the anti-trust trial MS argued that that, browser tied to the OS, is a feature. They were
by nfnaaron 16y ago
"Their browser is too tied to the OS."
During the debates surrounding the anti-trust trial MS argued that that, browser tied to the OS, is a feature. They were close to saying that the browser is the OS.
- rythie 16y agoOnly because Microsoft made that stupid design choice, there is no reason it needed to be part of the OS. The numerous alternative browsers that work perfectly well illustrates that.
- nfnaaron 16y agoAgreed 100%.
- mlinsey 16y agoYes. This was all an unfortunate result of Microsoft taking the "Browser is the OS of the future" hype a little too literally...
- electromagnetic 16y agoYes, in recent years. However, Microsoft has being using IE to display information for a long time, it's just that recently it has become progressively more tied to explicitly IE to the point that things freak out and crash if you disable IE. It wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft had been using the 'browser' as an integral part of the OS for displaying information etc. However, Microsoft is using IE as an integral part of the OS. I remember back in my days of using MSN messenger it was easy as a drop of a hat to cause a BSOD by disabling IE and clicking the link in MSN to my hotmail inbox. It would try to launch IE, freak out, crash MSN, then Explorer and then you'd get a BSOD. From what I've heard, this problem has somehow gotten worse.
- rythie 16y agoThey could have chucked this into a separate library, they didn't have to link it to the same one that is used to browse the web. No one would care if the internal documentation browser wasn't updated.
- jodrellblank 16y agoThey would have multiple codebases to maintain then. I think they were the IE engine for the main explorer folder view in Windows 98 - all the active desktop and custom folder backgrounds and theming the sidebar which slowly vanished in XP and onwards was MS-HTML and CSS based. It wasn't a stupid design decision, it was just a design decision.
- rythie 16y agoThey wouldn't really need to maintain the OS stuff, the HTML is not changing for it really. In contrast the HTML on the web is changing very quickly and therefore the browser needs frequent updates to keep up.
- kprobst 16y agoFunny how Google went and did the same thing.
- malnourish 16y agoAnd there doesn't seem to be much of a fuss. Makes me wonder, will we be able to run Firefox on Chrome OS?
- ElbertF 16y agoOnly if Mozilla makes a web based version of FireFox.