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points by ceejayoz 5 days ago | 0 comments

Microsoft was successfully forced to unbundle IE?

Not really? In the US it kept being bundled by default, they just made it possible to disable the front end; the MSHTML rendering engine was unremovable.

[–] ceejayoz 5 days ago

It doesn't even exist any more, and they were required to open up APIs to third-party browser makers. We'd be worse off without the settlement.

[–] brainwad 5 days ago

They just renamed it to Edge when they rebooted the UI. It's still a bundled browser, indeed the bundling is more aggressive than ever.

[–] ceejayoz 4 days ago

Edge is Chromium. Their competitor's engine.

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

It is now, but it initially did use Trident. I was on the IE team when Edge launched.

[–] ceejayoz 4 days ago

Does "Microsoft now bundles Google's browser engine" really scream "won the browser wars" to you?

Do you not think the settlement requiring APIs be opened up helped enable Chrome at all?

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

No, because the post-settlement era was actually the era of consolidated IE dominance. Chrome only started because MS, in their (unbroken by the FTC) dominance had sat around doing nothing for the web, which was bad for a web-based company like Google. Chrome also avoided using platform APIs because they wanted to be cross-platform.