The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows. The key comment:
This release of the IE Developer Channel uses a combination of code changes
and App-V Client to virtualize and run alongside IE11.
This is pretty huge, because it means that the support requirements for IE can be drastically reduced. That means faster releases without harming backwards compatibility. One IE for the server and OS platform, one IE the application platform (modern apps), and another for the user. Or even instanced per-user IE, or who knows what they could do. It's a big deal that they've gotten IE to the point that it can run in an App-V container, and the result will be a faster development cycle and earlier access to new features in the client, without imposing a huge support matrix on application developers.
This could pan out into versioned webview controls and all sorts of things. I hope Microsoft is willing to take this as far as it can go.
Hopefully it won't end up in a situation where a lot of apps bundle seriously outdated versions and any given system has a dozen old dlls strewn all over. Didn't that kinda happen with bundled flash players - even Adobe shipped exploitable players for years in other products?
Hopefully they do what Firefox tried (and failed) to do: ship a stable, enterprise version and an advanced version. No locking to arbitrary versions, but able to say, support "IE11 and IE Latest" in your product. Hopefully they allow developers to opt into a 30-60 day preview window such that they can remain a bit ahead of their customers.
The Firefox ESR branch is on the same release schedule as the Firefox 'Stable' branch. So, you get a scheduled release every 6 weeks. But ESR just gets the security fixes whereas Stable also gets the new features. When there's an out-of-band security update on Stable (a .1 release), ESR gets that, too. ESR is pegged to specific releases of Stable and operates in parallel for a few releases so there are two different ESRs... the older one and the newer one... so organizations can transition from one browser engine to the next over a couple month timespan and ensure corporate apps work on both.
Oddly, some non-organization people want ESR because they think it's updated less often. It's not.
That is one of the things that still make me wonder how an installer (or installer maker) decides retart is needed or not. I mean, take Visual Studio for example: it seems an order of magnitude larger and more complicated than a web browser, comes with prerequisites and whatnot and the last 2 or 3 release I installed didn't need a restart.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
What is funny is while the FAQ says a lot about past release versions of IE not supporting this, it does not say anything about whether future release version of IE (like IE12) will support this.
The fact that it's an installable application for other platforms doesn't mean that IE on Windows isn't used by system services... Quicktime is installable on Windows, so would you say Mac OS doesn't use it for anything? Because that's not true either.
> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows
You realize that this is something other browser makers have done since, oh, the invention of the browser? Perhaps it's amazing that Microsoft, of all companies, finally did it, but let's not get carried away declaring a historic moment.
Everything in context. It is huge for Microsoft specifically because it's previously been so entangled. Progress is good on all fronts. For the very large portion of the world that uses IE by default and will in the future get faster/better upgrades to be more secure and more full-featured, this is great.
Exactly, IE has come a long ways in the past few versions, but it's still behind other modern browsers. It makes me wonder why MS is still pushing it. Why not just bundle another browser with Windows and save themselves some effort?
Probably for the same reason Apple and Google both produce their own browser - it's too important a part of the user experience to delegate responsibility for it to a third party.
It's unlikely Google would suddenly turn around and say they're no longer producing Chrome for Windows, for example, but it's not impossible.
Also, IE, or rather Trident, is a core OS component. Applications rely on it for displaying web pages and HTML. Applications can also be written in HTML and JS, both HTML Applications (since... Windows 98, I think?) and WinRT applications (since Windows 8).
Yeah you're probably right. They want the experience to be cohesive with the rest of Windows. Last time I looked Chrome still doesn't have a metro mode besides just opening up in full screen mode, so there's one reason to keep IE around
This could pan out into versioned webview controls and all sorts of things. I hope Microsoft is willing to take this as far as it can go.