Microsoft Confirms IE8 Can be Removed from Windows 7 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Confirms IE8 Can be Removed from Windows 7

readwriteweb.com

7 pointsnreece7 comments

The headline could not be more misleading. IE8 cannot be removed, it can only be disabled so that the user cannot execute iexplore.exe. However, any program that makes use of the web browser control will still be able to instantiate it. And, the user can re-enable iexplore.exe at any time.

All operating systems today need to come with some library or framework that lays out and renders HTML and CSS, whether they have a "web browser" installed or not. It's just one of those basic things developers have come to expect to be available when creating GUI software, and personally I'd hate to see it removed as an option.

That Trident is that option makes sense to me; if it could be swapped out, though, that'd be interesting. I wonder if an interface could be written so that Gecko or Webkit could be used in place of mshtml.dll?

Wine has an implementation using Gecko.

The old Gecko ActiveX control was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the Trident one. There was an IEPatcher which worked in some cases, though not always:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm#usingPatcher

This is, of course, only applicable to programs which use the ActiveX control. It's also a really old Mozilla version.

> Important to recognize is that while these applications can be turned off, meaning they are not loaded by the operating system or available for use, the files remain present on the hard disk in a staging area so that they can be easily turned back on again without the need to use installation media.

I hope there's a solution, first- or third-party, that wipes the staging "cache" from disk. I rather like keeping what I don't need on offline media, and, as a Mac user, I also rather like keeping down the size of my Boot Camp partition.

Is this going to be a huge issue for you? I can see these applications taking up 1-2G at the absolute maximum, more likely in the hundreds of MB. If those margins are significant for you, then you're probably already going to be seeing system slowdowns due to low disk space.

There probably will be a solution to remove the staging "cache" but features like "help" uses ie's rendering engine which I'm sure most users won't mind loosing.

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