In a move prompted by the badgering of those unelected, dictator, Eurocrats, Microsoft announced a couple of days ago that they will not be including Internet Explorer in the European distributions of Windows 7. OEM’s will be free to include any or no browser they feel like.
To me, this is another case of tax payers money being wasted. The European Union central “government” continues to bloat with the hiring of staff from just a couple of countries (what percentage of their staff are non-native French speakers?) and wastes money and time on something so trivial as web browsers, crisp flavours, and defining what is chocolate.
Right now, there is nothing, to stop anyone from choosing what web browser or media player you want. I doubt the inclusion of IE has impacted the success of Firefox, Safari or Chrome. In fact, they seem to do quite well.
How much of a waste of time is this? How many times have you seen Windows N edition? According to The Register “sales of Windows XP N represented just 0.005 per cent or 1/20,000th of one per cent of overall XP sales in Europe by April 2006”. Those were probably installs in Brussels or Paris.
There’s some thinking that the grey suits in the EU are having a hissy fit because of this announcement. It pre-empts their decision on what they would do to MS. What was MS to do? They will RTM Windows 7 in July and the OEM’s will get immediate access to it to prepare their builds. Are MS and the OEM’s to wait on some civil servants (and we know how hard working and how schedule conscious they are, right?) to make up their minds on something while these businesses lose billions of Euros? That’s pure nonsense.
Odds are, IE will be available to customers via Automatic Updates as an optional download if the OEM doesn’t include it.
The worst part of this decission is that there is now no upgrade path for existing customers to go with either XP or Vista. You will need to do a clean install to remove IE and then download it…only in Europe, man!
Holy Crap Will! Really???