Tag: windows 7 e

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Windows 7 WILL have IE


The EU fuelled saga of IE8 in Windows 7 has taken another turn now-it seems Windows 7 WILL included Internet Explorer here in Europe. Microsoft have instead agreed with the EU’s idea of having a “ballot screen” allowing users to choose and download other competing browsers such as Firefox or (the instigators of this whole thing) Opera…This is a bit of an about-turn as MS were dead set against this idea initially.

The interesting thing is how this affects the availability of Windows 7 upgrades in Europe. The last minute creation of “Windows E” meant that an upgrade version wouldn’t be available in Europe so users would need to do a clean install-which wasn’t an ideal situation. However with this change, perhaps we will get the ability to upgrade after all?

It seems that Microsoft will continue with Windows 7 “E” until the EU formally accepts the Ballot proposal. Hopefully that won’t take too long (in the work of international law) to go through and Europe will be able to get it’s upgrade on! The RC installation of Windows 7 doesn’t expire until March 2010 so if they can get it wrapped up before then-that should suit everybody…expect those who’ve pre-ordered!

Thanks to Mary Jo for this and as she updates, I’ll update 🙂

*Update* It seems that Windows 7 E may well still be the plan!

*Update* There is now an official statement on the Microsoft PressPass site here. The most exciting bit is:

“Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world.” (Bold mine).

The EU should accept it as it was their/Opera’s idea in the first place so hopefully we’ll all be doing nice upgrade installs on our machines soon-whoo hoo!

Windows 7 e

Check out my sweet photo editing skills 😉

*Update* Opera now want the Ballot screen to be logo free (See techflash)! I’ve said it before that Opera are, and pardon my French, taking the piss…as formerly funny fellow Northerner Peter kay once said “Too far (Tony), too far”!

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Windows 7 without IE 8


Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer 8 in EU, and we’ll have to download it if we want to use it.

I’m a fan of IE & MS in general, and am pretty fed up with how much meddling the EU have done with their products…first Vista N (with Media Player) and now Windows 7 E (without IE). I don’t know anyone who has pro-actively purchased the Vista N product, either in the consumer or business world. There is one company I know who, for whatever reason, got the “N” version and then spent a fair amount of time getting Media Player back on to users pcs!

My thoughts are this:

The people who want to change browsers for whatever reason (better ACID test scores, better extensions, faster loading etc) will have no trouble in downloading a new browser and setting that as their default.

The people that don’t know how to do that (Mum’s, Dad’s,OAP’s etc) are also the people who don’t care what brwoser they use. As long as they can access the web they’re happy-they don’t mind if some things are rendered in a non-standards compliant way or if it takes 4/5ths of a second longer to load up…they just want to check their email etc and be done with it.

So who benefits from the un-bundling of IE 8 with Windows 7? That is a question I’m not sure there is an answer to…other than no-one, and maybe the EU getting their power fix.

I see this as at best going almost completely un-noticed as people just download IE 8 anyway or at best, causing extra confusion for users.

Opera are annoying me as they are now saying:

“However, we do not believe that Microsoft’s move will restore competition for desktop browsers. Most users get their operating systems from the OEM channel and Microsoft will recommend that OEMs pre-install IE8. As such, users are unlikely to be given a genuine choice of browsers.”

The way I look at it is:

If Opera is that brilliant and Opera did a proper job marketing it etc, then it’s market share would be bigger…the same goes for the other browsers guys.

I’m a big fan of Microsoft but I wouldn’t refuse to use a better product just because it was made by a competitor. I’ve got an iPod, I always used Google instead of Live Search (although I now Bing), I use VMWare Workstation instead of Virtual PC and there are other examples too. For a number of reasons I prefer Internet Explorer as my default browser but, if I need to, I will use another browser alongside it…I’ve got Firefox on this machine next to IE 8…but I’ve only used it once this year.

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