When I loaded Office 2000 neither the box, nor the instructions, said that I needed Intenet Exploder(IE) to run Office 2000. The only mention that Office 2000 needs IE in order to work is when set-up says “Installing IE, Office 2000 requires IE in order to function”. It did not even give me the option NOT to install IE! If I had known this, I would not have bought, nor installed, Office 2000. When I removed IE, it took all of my DLL’s, and you Techies know what that means! BANG! Crash! Boom! Shplunk!
My questions are…
Is this a deceptive trade practice? Are their no laws about this kind of thing? It seems I have been FORCED to have IE on my system. I think it is Microsofts way of the ‘Hold-outs’.
This is part of the governments antitrust case against Microsoft. I believe a year ago or so Microsoft was ordered to de-couple IE from the Windows operating system. Microsoft pretty much ignored the order. They did a little song and dance back then looking like they were barely complying. As you can see MS didn’t take the threat seriously for long. Microsoft claims that the Operating System and IE are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate them now and since Office is also tied deeply with the OS they need IE as well. Perhaps this was Microsoft’s way around the court order. It is not REQUIRED for the operating system but it IS required for Office realizing that it amounts to much the same thing. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit.
That said I think you can still install other browsers but I make no claims to their stability on Windows 2000.
“It is not REQUIRED for the operating system but it IS required for Office realizing that it amounts to much the same thing.”
Whoa! I’m just a poor boy who doesn’t get a single stock option in my Christmas stocking so I use WordPerfect Office 2000 ($30 OEM)instead of Office (many $$$$). IT doesn’t need IE to run.
No problems here. Almost nothing ‘requires’ IE to run properly. Microsoft, in the interest of putting other people out of business (notably Netscape) wrote the latest versions of Microsoft programs in such a way as to make IE an intrinsic part. There’s no reason it has to be done this way but Microsoft will tell you they have a better product as a result. With IE tied so closely to MS-Office products they can do more ‘cool’ things like embedding HTML documents directly into MS-Word and so on.
Just think of Office Tookay as taking up a bit more space (the space for hickplorer) on your hard drive. Let it bring up the program when it needs to, but keep using Netscape (or Lynx, or Mosaic, or whatever you prefer) to browse pages. When you start Netscape up the first time after installing icksplorer, it will let you know it is no longer the default browser and give you a chance to do something about it. So will riplorer, but when it asks, tell it no and check the ‘Don’t freaken bother me again!’ box. Voila! You have both browsers (which will come in handy for some web sites) available for use. The default browser you want is the only one you will see ninety-nine percent of the time. Tricky, yes, but abuse? Don’t think so.
I am the System Administrator at my firm. This title means that I know more about computers then everyone else in my office. Trust me, that is not saying much.
Last year we switched tax software to a new vendor. For the record the new software was NOT a Microsoft product. I went over all requirements carefully before we purchased the software.
After I was done installing the tax software a message came up promoting me to install Internet Explorer and warning me that the software couldn’t run without IE.
I called Tech support and they confirmed that I HAD to install IE to run their software. It seems that they had purchased some dat files from Microsoft and in order to use the dat files they had to force their customers to install IE.
Installing IE may not be a problem for someone with a new computer with 1000GB of harddrive but for an older computer with only 1GB any extra program is too much.
Ahh, but Windows 98 doesn’t respect the default browser choice in some situations where it otherwise should. Microsoft executive Brad Chase was quoted in the antitrust trial record as stating a desire to make the use of a browser other than IE on Windows 98 “a jolting experience.” Presumably this was one result of that desire.