IE7 Separated from Windows Explorer

An anonymous reader writes "Security experts warned Microsoft 10 years ago that putting IE as a component of Windows Explorer was a bad idea, looks like Microsoft finally decided to listen to the advice. According to a short write up in Business Week, Microsoft has decided that when IE7 comes out with Vista it will no longer be a component of Windows Explorer and will be able to replace IE6 even on XP machines."

Welcome news

[From A Far Away Land]

I had heard initially that IE7 wasn't going to be available for Windows 2000, and assumed that meant it wasn't going to be for XP either. If it works on XP, what would stop it from running on 2000 other than a Microsoft desire to cripple it so that people have one more reason they must leave 2000 which still works fine for most tasks [as long as it's well patched]?

Lied to the EU?

[Manip]

Didn't Microsoft engineers claim, in court, to the EU that they couldn't remove Internet Explorer from the Operating System without breaking it?

Interesting seeing as Microsoft are now suddenly able to seperate the two (in reference to Windows XP, not Windows Vista).

On XP

[Moby Cock]

This is great news! However, will IE7 on a Win XP box simply be an add-on (a la Firefox) while maintaining the status quo for Windows Explorer and IE being linked?

Okay, but...

[babbling]

Will Windows Explorer still be able to function as a web browser once IE7 has been installed separately on XP?

I imagine a lot of users are quite used to typing webaddress.com into Windows Explorer, now. I suppose that should respond by launching the user's default browser with the command line argument webaddress.com, but is that what it will do, or will WinExplore still function as a browser?

Re:Lied to the EU?

[Cro Magnon]

It's only a lie if an IE-less Vista isn't broken.

Great! Now to get Konqueror!

[Kelson]

I'm sure I'm about to burn karma with this... but in KDE, Konqueror acts as both web browser and file manager. At least it's entirely userspace, but does anyone know how closely the file managing and web browsing aspects of Konqueror are tied?

meh

[popeguilty]

Will anyone who isn't currently using MSIE6 use MSIE7 on this news?

Good news

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

IE was integrated because the same kind of display used to show files and directories could be used to display web content, and it made sense to integrate the same technology in order to save on system resources.

Today, with people having more horsepower in their computer then they know what to do with, same goes for hard drive space, having a tightly integrated web browser / file browser doesn't make sense, and it has been a source of Microsoft's security problems.

Yes, you will still be able to type a web address in the file explorer in Vista and have a web page display . While explorer and internet explorer are no longer integrated, Vista will transparently switch between the applications and maintain the same window view.

I am sure that I.E. components will still be launched at system startup, to give Microsoft and edge over 3rd party browsers for quick browser launching, but by removing the integration with the file explorer, this will definitely be a welcomed change that should offer better security in the long run, which Microsoft desperitely needs.

So this explains the delay?

[Billly Gates]

Microsoft mentioned it was due to security designs in Vista.

I doubt though that something so integrated into windows explorer can be seperated and reprogrammed into a seperate application within the extra 2 months.

Its alot of work not to mention may break many applications. For example cdroms that use autoplay sometimes display html and javascript in the windows explorer menu in a seperate pane. I suppose you could reprogram windows explorer to just call an IE7.dll to display it.

But Microsoft was found guilty of merging IE into a million libraries so third party apps would not function without IE and infact required it. Even a command prompt program that uses strings requires IE as a result.

Thank god I am not on the windows development team.

FTP Evidence

[beavt8r]

I installed IE7 (let me explain) and the FTP functionality in it is just like directory listings like Firefox has. I use IE for ftp just so I have the ease of a Windows Explorer-like interface for FTP. So I can't do that with IE7. But, if I open windows explorer or any folder, I can put an FTP address in that address bar and it works just like IE6 with the explorer interface. Unintentionally, I found out when I installed that it kept it separate. Interesting...

What about windowsupdates

[Anonymous Coward]

So does that mean that it will be possible to run windowsupdate from within Firefox (or from any other non-native browser)?

Re:Okay, but...

[doofusclam]

>>it's a VERY simple programming trick.

No it isn't. Most of the problem is that ActiveX and other MS native components on a webpage aren't supported in other browsers, and for good reason.

Windows Update for example always calls IE and uses ActiveX. Changing the default browser is going to break WU.

Re:Finally!

[Crussy]

You're referring to Autoplay as a flaw?

Do you think that anyone back during the conception of that feature thought that a decade down the road companies were going to distribute executables on music cds that install rootkits a la DRM? Outside of that whole fiasco there's no possibly reason why autoplay is not a feature. Nearly everyone knows that programs launch when they insert their cds and most the time this feature saves them the time of loading it. Anyone who really needs to do anything besides run whatever the default program is should know to hold down shift anyway. It's not like the cd-rom is a vulnerable part of the computer where unapproved information is readily inserted, it's a piece of hardware a foot away from my leg - I know if anything malicious is going to be placed in there.

Glad to hear it

[Bertie]

Just the other day I went to open an HTML page I'd made in IE7, to check that it rendered properly. After fumbling around for a few minutes wondering where they'd hidden the menu bar (yeah, clever one, Microsoft, give your most-used program a UI that flies in the face of 20 years of convention, and don't tell anybody you need to hit the ALT key to bring it up, that'll go down a treat with Joe User), I selected "open", browsed to the file... ...And IE7 opened the page in Firefox, my default browser!

Clever, eh?

Re:Replace IE6 on XP machines?

[drinkypoo]

Well, you can make multiple IE installs now by unpacking the installation cab files into a directory and putting a file called something like "IEXPLORE.exe.local" (I think that's it) into the directory. Unfortunately, it won't show the proper version in the About box, but if you load a page that renders differently in the two versions you can see that it is in fact using the older renderer. This is what I do to do testing between IE5.5 and IE6 on WinXP now. Maybe this new version will install alongside IE6?

Re:What about windowsupdates

[tst4eko]

Unless M$ has changed it, my understanding was that WindowsUpdate will be a new applet within the Vista Control Panel, totally separate from IE. You would no longer use any browser to update from. Since it needs an internet connection just to download those updates, I'm not sure what kind of backend Vista will use.

Re:Great! Now to get Konqueror!

[Anonymous Coward]

>The difference is that a Ctrl-Alt-Bksp will kill X and give you a command prompt, whereas Windows has no such option

Actually pulling up taskmanager.exe by way of Ctrl-Alt-Delete will allow you to start a command shell.

Re:Lied to the US DOJ?

[ischorr]

The thing that's always bugged me about #1 is that no one ever seemed to seperate IE the application and IE the HTML rendering/display engine. Most of what the DoJ was looking for could have been remedied by getting rid of iexplorer.exe and making small modifications to any part of the system that expected it to be there.

It'd be similar to saying that Safari can't be removed from OS X because a number of applications and system utilities rely on Webkit. Of course you can get rid of Safari without getting rid of the libraries - just drag the userland app to the trash.

Personally, I think that saying that there was no way to get rid of IE, the application, without breaking Windows was not true at all. People still don't seem to make that distinction.

Re:Glad to hear it

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute, IE7 has a built-in page editer now?

Re: java and architecture neutrality.

[Krach42]

Yeah, I actually took a graphics class where we had to write a bunch of programs. Java provides no defined behavior for drawing a single pixel on the screen. You could use (and we were told) to use a drawRect() with width and height of 0. (using 1 for both results in a 2x2 rectangle by definition)

The problem is that some OSes and implementations don't draw anything at all. So, on Windows and Linux, you get a pixel, on Mac OSX, and Sun, you get nothing. (I mean, it's a 0 width, 0 height rectangle, that means draw nothing, right?)

The frustrating thing is the first Lab went out, and I designed it on a Linux machine, and I turn it in, and the TA for the course, who was grading them, was grading them on a Sun machine. So the response comes back "Your program doesn't draw anything" Aw... thanks Java.

I've actually written a POSIX compliant web-server that supported CGI/1.1, and enough HTTP/1.1 to be at least useful, and it was far more compatible at the source level than Java was at the binary level.