For those of you visiting from the recent Associated Press article, feel free to follow me on Twitter and stick around on the forums as well. In addition, for those of you looking for where this article falls on the grand timeline of things (most people miss the date published at the bottom of the article), this post was posted on the 4th of March at 12:03 AM Eastern Time, coinciding with Chris’s post just over one hour prior.
Thanks for stopping by, and welcome to AeroXperience. ~Bryant
Thanks exclusively and entirely to efforts between Chris Holmes and me, we discovered that Internet Explorer 8 can be removed from at least Windows 7 build 7048, which is a good sign for regulatory overlords in the EU and in the States. Given that this change doesn’t exist in Beta 1, the odds that this change will persist through to RC are quite high. Don’t believe this can be done? Well, how about a Windows Features dialog below for proof?
There is a catch: For now, this only seems to wipe the actual executable running Internet Explorer 8 (iexplore.exe), but given that many of the most vocal proponents of choice were just looking for an option to functionally remove IE8, this might’ve been the only way to do it without killing the rest of Windows. In addition, this actually takes two reboots and a configuration step to complete, so there’s definitely something going on behind the scenes (likely a remapping of where IE-related functions can be found for other elements in Windows so that Windows doesn’t complain about IE’s nonexistence).
You can catch the steps, as well as final screenshots of the somewhat-obliterated product, after the break.
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