<story><title>Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-removing-internet-explorer-from-pcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>&amp;gt;and replace them with compatibility shims&lt;p&gt;christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination?  Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust litigation but somehow you manage to make it out by smirking through interviews and the grace of a nation thats just awakening to the dawn of the internet.&lt;p&gt;then fast forward 20 years later, your dumpster-fire web browser with all its lock-in and exploits still exists in the OS but the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software.&lt;p&gt;So you sunset the horrorshow that was IE in favour of &lt;i&gt;your competitors&lt;/i&gt; browser engine to power your new browser but the haggard burro of a thing you call an OS is so inextricably encumbered by your blues-traveler era nineties myopia you now need a team of H1B&amp;#x27;s to start writing shims and the burger from lunch feels like its starting to come back up...&lt;p&gt;...now eight years later whatever frankenstein browser you convinced yourself was a good idea to build is &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; nowhere near as popular as your competitors, and thats after you added built-in gaslighting to your search engine to dissuade anyone from even searching for your competitors browser.  you even came up with your own prefix to force links in your daytime infomercial of an OS to open directly in your new pet browser but people &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; dont want to use it.  heck, you routinely reset their default browser and the only thing its managed to do is galvanize what by all indicators is a nearly white-hot detest for your pet chrome that has 45 seconds of unavoidable fullscreen lecture on first load, built in ads and tours, and a weird buy now pay later feature.</text></item><item><author>PreInternet01</author><text>More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is.&lt;p&gt;On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicitly install &amp;#x27;Edge for Business&amp;#x27;. Which you should.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>horsawlarway</author><text>This is a very strange comment.&lt;p&gt;Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation.  There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are...&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;1. They&amp;#x27;ve put a lot of work into the browser, and they&amp;#x27;ve shared many components of it with other tooling.  EX: Internet &lt;i&gt;EXPLORER&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;EXPLORER&lt;/i&gt; the file system browser don&amp;#x27;t share their name by mistake.  They&amp;#x27;re so similar I can load the same COM addin in both.&lt;p&gt;2. From a pure usability perspective, it makes a boat load of sense to prevent a user from accidentally uninstalling the last browser on the machine.  When dealing with edge cases and possible support calls, making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable.  Safari is also not removable... for similar reasons.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Further - I think it&amp;#x27;s actually a fairly good credit to MSFT that they&amp;#x27;re bothering with shims at all, and are maintaining a good chunk of compatibility for applications that were written literally decades ago.&lt;p&gt;Both Google and Apples&amp;#x27;s approach to this would literally be: &amp;quot;We&amp;#x27;re so sorry, that&amp;#x27;s no longer supported and you&amp;#x27;re f*#$ed.  Go upgrade, get your vendors to upgrade, or eat shit.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;MSFT isn&amp;#x27;t writing shims because they still need them... they&amp;#x27;re writing shims because they have enterprise customers who want them, and they actually give a fuck about that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-removing-internet-explorer-from-pcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>&amp;gt;and replace them with compatibility shims&lt;p&gt;christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination?  Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust litigation but somehow you manage to make it out by smirking through interviews and the grace of a nation thats just awakening to the dawn of the internet.&lt;p&gt;then fast forward 20 years later, your dumpster-fire web browser with all its lock-in and exploits still exists in the OS but the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software.&lt;p&gt;So you sunset the horrorshow that was IE in favour of &lt;i&gt;your competitors&lt;/i&gt; browser engine to power your new browser but the haggard burro of a thing you call an OS is so inextricably encumbered by your blues-traveler era nineties myopia you now need a team of H1B&amp;#x27;s to start writing shims and the burger from lunch feels like its starting to come back up...&lt;p&gt;...now eight years later whatever frankenstein browser you convinced yourself was a good idea to build is &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; nowhere near as popular as your competitors, and thats after you added built-in gaslighting to your search engine to dissuade anyone from even searching for your competitors browser.  you even came up with your own prefix to force links in your daytime infomercial of an OS to open directly in your new pet browser but people &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; dont want to use it.  heck, you routinely reset their default browser and the only thing its managed to do is galvanize what by all indicators is a nearly white-hot detest for your pet chrome that has 45 seconds of unavoidable fullscreen lecture on first load, built in ads and tours, and a weird buy now pay later feature.</text></item><item><author>PreInternet01</author><text>More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is.&lt;p&gt;On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicitly install &amp;#x27;Edge for Business&amp;#x27;. Which you should.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelt</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Well, it&amp;#x27;s kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation.&lt;p&gt;Using a web browser as your native app&amp;#x27;s rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they were just 15 years ahead of the curve.</text></comment>