[brokenparser]

> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows

Calling bull. MSIE has never been "entangled" with the OS and this has in fact been proven in court ( http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613g.pdf pages 283 through 288 are especially noteworthy). The integration was merely a scam to defeat Netscape.

Here's a bunch of standalone versions from 1996 to 2002 (made by MSFT themselves) which can all run side by side: http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie/win32/

On the same site, you can find MSIE for HP-UX and Solaris.

[kevingadd]

IE has been a system-level service in Windows for a long time. Naturally, you could boot the kernel without it, but a bunch of included Windows software (by Microsoft, as part of the distribution) and even system libraries rely on parts of IE.

Even now, there are weird dependencies on IE components that you wouldn't expect: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web...

It's quite possible it was all bullshit at the time of the antitrust case, but it's been true for quite a while now. In practice, 'removing' IE from windows at this point would just mean removing iexplore.exe, because literally every native .dll and COM .dll bundled with IE is probably leveraged by some application or component somewhere in the OS. The whole IE object model and programming interface are documented on the web and exposed, so there are programs using them - Valve's Steam game management/storefront app used to use it before they moved to their own embedded version of WebKit.

[vertex-four]

> In practice, 'removing' IE from windows at this point would just mean removing iexplore.exe

And this is exactly what happens if you don't install IE with Browser Choice in the EU. The rendering engine and all the DLLs are still installed, It's just iexplore.exe which isn't.

[kyberias]

I has been, what, 15 years from those court proceedings. Don't you think it is possible the MSIE has been tied to the operating system in subsequent releases: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8?

[TallGuyShort]

Sure it's possible, but then it wouldn't be so amazing that they had un-done it. Microsoft was, in those court proceedings, claiming that being integrated with the OS was a very fundamental part of IE that was not trivially undone.

[yuhong]

AFAIK nothing much has changed since these days, but MS did add a option to remove the Internet Explorer directory in Program Files in Vista and note that HTML Help for example already depended on IE components even back in 1997.