Gearfuse

Remember a few years ago, when Microsoft and the EU got into a tussle over the bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows OS? Microsoft lost, got hit with a billion dollars in fines and was forced to remove IE from Windows in future versions. Now, with the release of Windows 7 on the horizon, Microsoft isn’t taking any chances and has confirmed that IE will be missing from European versions of Windows 7.

While I understand this entirely, what I don’t get is how this benefits the consumer. With no web browser installed on the OS by default, how the hell is somebody supposed to download an alternative browser like Firefox or Safari? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

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I don’t know what kind of crack Microsoft is smoking but it must be hooked on it. Today, the Redmond-based company confirmed that it is indeed working on the Zune HD to compete with not the iPhone, but rather the iPod Touch. It’ll have an OLED touchscreen, HD radio tuner (big whoop) and will use a new Zune Marketplace for purchasing videos and music. The hilarious part, however, lies in the fact that the Zune HD will be powered by Windows CE and Internet Explorer. Yes, Windows CE. You can officially call Microsoft a non-hip dinosaur now.

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Here’s something out of left-field that I don’t think anyone except the geniuses at Microsoft expected. In recent tests, it’s been revealed that Internet Explorer 8 uses twice the memory of Firefox. As if that wasn’t enough to blow your mind, get this shit:

In a test involving IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 10 rich media sites were opened in each on a machine running Vista with 2 GB RAM. In the end IE8 sucked up 380MB of memory, IE7 260MB and Firefox accounted for 159MB. You would be surprised to know that when Windows XP starts it takes 130 – 150MB, then start IE8 and suddenly you would be looking at a larger memory print than Windows XP

Yes. Microsoft has managed to make IE8 such a RAM hog, that it takes a significantly more amount of memory to start it than it does to start Windows XP. Is this the nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer? Surely Microsoft will force everyone to upgrade to IE8 and those with older computers will be caught in the dust. Think, Microsoft! Think!

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We would have been a little more excited if somebody else had leaked their software by mistake and allowed everybody to download for free, nonetheless we are slightly excited to learn that Microsoft Japan mistakenly put Internet Explorer 7 (Japanese version) on Windows Update this afternoon. The above screen cap was taken at 2:57 pm Tokyo time today. Some Japanese users have even managed to install the new browser successfully, keeping in mind that the public release should be in 2008.

The company took the program down and issued an apology afterwards, but we think there’s not much to be sorry about. They even taught people how to uninstall it. Yeah, like we want those extra bugs on your super stable OS. –Sam Chan

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