5 ms·
IIRC this is exactly what MS claimed about bundling IE : it was tied into the kernel.
by the-dude 6y ago
IIRC this is exactly what MS claimed about bundling IE : it was tied into the kernel.
- breckenedge 6y agoYes that was a defense. Explorer.exe and IE were intimately tied together. Remember “active desktop”? You could make your Windows desktop background a web page. Crazy times...
- Steltek 6y agoI wouldn't mind that, actually. I could create my own dashboard/background.
- not_knuth 6y agoWell as always, that can easily be done on Linux. There is even a widget on KDE that lets you do precisely that.
- wongarsu 6y agoWith Wallpaper Engine or similar programs you can still do it. It's no longer a Windows feature, but they have enough API surface to make it possible for other software to implement.
- Throwaway1771 6y agoThis can still be done.
- hnlmorg 6y agoBare in mind back then was before "Web 2.0", there wasn't AJAX, responsive web design and any of the other technologies we now take for granted. And to add to the woes, most computers still weren't powerful enough to handle running Active Desktop. It was a huge resource drain. Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though. These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
- Grazester 6y agoAnd I loved it!
- jaimex2 6y agoTo be fair IE crashing would take out the whole OS.
- jonplackett 6y agoBack then anything crashing usually took down the whole OS
- anoncake 6y agoDidn't MS still argue they couldn't unbundle IE in the XP days?
- EE84M3i 6y agoI don't think MS said it was bundled in the kernel, but it is true that parts of IE are tied into the OS (or at least used to be) in the form of mshtml and jscript.
- josefx 6y agoBasic functionality like windows update was implemented using websites and activex components. You couldn't run that with any other browser.
- anoncake 6y agoActually you could, as long as that browser used the Trident engine. Microsoft could have easily shipped a dedicated update application that's just a simple "browser" locked to the windows update website.
- gsich 6y agoIt's a lame excuse anyway. They could have just hidden the IE symbol, deactivating auto-open with IE and it would have been fine.