Oriumpor's Journal: IE goes bye bye

EDIT:July 9, 2004

I have tried this with Firefox .9 and have had success... I would ammend this entry to change the install directory for firefox to the internet explorer directory as it makes the over-writing process much cleaner... and some apps are fooled more easily that way.

Well, to anyone with a mind for history, the prevelance of IE security holes, and 0 day exploits is obvious. The reasons for moving to a more stable and feature rich, not to mention less used, browser are obvious to the security minded.

So, for me to find that no one else had tried to remove IE entirely from their XP pro system, to document it online anyways, was pretty astonishing.

Although I tried I was not able to remove IE entirely... but at least it is no longer call-able directly by tons of spyware/popupware applications.

First, I downloaded firefox 0.8. I have had more experience with it than .9, but I suppose it would work just as well.

After which through copying, pasting, and deleting I was able to discover the naming convention that M$ uses to self heal the iexplore.exe file. Upon deletion it copies the "good" iexplore.exe to iexplore.exe.new in the \%progfiles%\Internet explorer\ directory.

So now I had a name for a file I had to make windows unable to write. So I created an empty file with that name (iexplore.exe.new)(0 byte) and set the security so that no user had any permissions to read or write it.

After which I copied the firefox executable over the iexplore.exe and opened it up. I was still able to cause an explorer window to become an IE window (via typing a url in the location bar) but now 99% of the popup/spyware/adware BS can't call IE to open up.

There may be more to it, and the very nature of self healing is not obvious to me so I guarantee nothing.

On top of which I would reccommend making a backup copy of your internet explorer executable just in-case you screw something up horribly.

And if it still doesn't work... Don't fight it