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Comment by dpcx | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft was forced around Internet Explorer not "just" because theirs was pre-installed. It was more that Internet Explorer had become so baked in to the system that it literally could not be removed without breaking Windows. That was the thing that caused rulings against Microsoft.

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I'm not sure that holds up in practice. The "fix" for the anti-trust claim (or what it was called) was for Microsoft to add a popup asking the user what browser they wanted, and Internet Explorer (or whatever it's called today) is still as embedded into the OS as it was in the past.

IE isn't embedded in the OS in any significant way any more, and hasn't been for a while. Windows Explorer used to basically be a wrapper around IE, for example.

Windows explorer is STILL a wrapper around IE - I can go install COM components for IE that will run just fine in explorer.

And the vast majority of the webviews used by the OS were IE (now webview2, based on Edge instead).

It turns out the ability to display a webpage is a pretty critical part of any modern operating system - they all support some form of a webview. The one in Windows is based on browsers that MS develops and owns (IE, then EdgeClassic, now Chromium Edge). It's absolutely baked in still.

Nowadays the Windows default browser is called Microsoft Edge (based around Blink engine), and you still cannot remove it from the OS as it's "essential component of our [Microsoft] operating system", at least according to Microsoft themselves:

> Microsoft Edge is the web browser recommended by Microsoft and is the default web browser for Windows. Because Windows supports applications that rely on the web platform, our default web browser is an essential component of our operating system and can’t be uninstalled. To provide our users with compatibility, compliance, accessibility, and performance, we'll continue updating Microsoft Edge through the browser installer or Windows updates.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/why-can-t...

I still click on links in some parts of the OS or other applications on Windows 10 that opens in Microsoft Edge, even though I've set Firefox to be my default browser.

Windows 11 shell is based on chromium now.

I don't know if it shares with the core that buildin edge use. But if it is the case, then obviously you can't remove it just like you can't remove core of ie in pre windows 11 world.

By the way, some function of the new shell seems relies on service not available under safe mode. So the explore.exe will crash repeatedly when you are in safe mode. __And it openes the edge for help article every time it crashed__, so you ends up with dozens of same tab in the edge.

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