Steven Taylor points to a BBC report that, in response to EU complaints about its monopsony oligopoly power, Microsoft will ship Windows 7 to Europe minus Internet Explorer. In addition to thinking, as I do, that the whole thing is rather silly, he wonders about the practicalities of this:
[O]ne suspects that a new Windows machine will have a tool to download IE (a distinction without a difference, in many ways) even if IE itself isn’t on the harddrive, since it is possible that the machine might not even have a web browser on it to start with (which would be a real pain, come to think of it).
And I say all of this as someone who downloads Firefox as one of the very first acts performed on a new Windows-based computer. Indeed, come to think of it, I consider IE my Firefox Download Utility, as apart from a handful of work-related functions that only work in IE, I never open it up after downloading Firefox.
Quite right. One has to get online in some fashion, which requires that a browser of some sort be installed. Or no?
UPDATE: Via Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein, an NBC News report about “something called the Internet.”
