I would expect IE8 will be coming out and "bundled" with Windows Seven, and that mostly tells when the release date will be.

The bundling of Internet Exploder, which Microsoft blatantly lied about during the US antitrust laws, could be removed and should be, from Windows. The fact that Opera has a court case pending in the EU, should be expanded to the bundling of IE from Windows. It is possible to remove IE6 from XP, it is also possible to remove IE7 completely from Vista. I have done it myself in XP, and know someone who has done it with Vista. But windows systems run far far better without Internet Exploder.

Something interesting:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/237399/hps-fury-at-vista-capable-downgrade.html

HP's fury at Vista Capable downgrade
HP sent Microsoft a stinging rebuke for its decision to drop the requirements for the controversial Vista Capable scheme, new court documents have revealed.

Court documents released last week claimed that Microsoft lowered the Vista Capable requirements at the behest of Intel, which complained that plans to exclude its 915 chipset from the scheme would cost the company billions of dollars.

That decision sparked a furious response from HP senior vice president, Richard Walker, according to transcripts of emails that have been put before the court.

"If I were to be completely cynical about the course of events leading up to this, I'd suggest that my friends in Santa Clara [Intel] slept well last night knowing they don't have to worry that part of their line up, non compliant as it

would have been based on WDDM [Windows Display Drive Model] requirement for 1/4, will be exposed to public scrutiny," the email read.

Walker complained that HP had invested heavily in creating PCs that met Microsoft's original Vista Capable requirements, only to find they had been lowered shortly before launch. "Now we have a situation where PC manufacturers (and processor/chipset suppliers) can claim Vista Capable in a 'good' mode just because it will run. What kind of consumer assurance is that? Hardly one that puts any credence behind your desire to create the 'best possible customer experience for the Windows Vista update'".

Allchin fury

HP's email prompted then Microsoft co-President, Jim Allchin, to send a furious email of his own to company CEO Steve Ballmer.

Allchin's email suggests the decision to lower the requirements was made in his absence by Ballmer, following "a call between you and Paul [Otellini, Intel CEO]."

"I am beyond being upset here," Allchin wrote to Ballmer. "What a mess. Now we have an upset partner, Microsoft destroyed credibility [sic], as well as my own credibility shot."

Ballmer, in turn, blamed another Microsoft executive, Will Poole, in a rather erratically typed reply to Allchin. "I had nothing to do with this Will handled everything I received a message that paul was going to call Will said he would handle it Paul called I had not even had a chance to report his issues when Will told me he had solved them (it did not sound like he had) I am not even in the detail of the issues.

You better get will under control thanks."
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That Ballmer wants us to believe that he is (or was) blind, deaf and dumb do not mean that it would be true.

You may think it would be fun to extract IE from Windows, but it is not advised. Your best bet is to install the browser of your choice and use it as your default browser. Completely removing IE from Windows does not speed up Windows, in fact it could slow it to a crawl. Removing IE also alters and/or removes important Windows system files and could make your OS more prone to crashes and hangs. Making a competing browser your default should work just fine, as IE does not use much in the way of system resources when it is not running. In fact, Windows itself makes it easy to "remove" IE from Windows. You go to add/remove Windows components and uncheck IE. It will remove shortcuts and remove IE as the default. This is a much safer and sounder route than actually extracting IE from Windows.

The main thing lacking seems to be JavaScript performance. I think the main selling points of Safari, Chrome and Firefox are the raw performance of processing JavaScript on most webpages. This makes these browsers far quicker to use than IE. To me all the other features are largely irrelevant, browsing quickly is what is important. After all most of the web is built on the open standards of DHTML and Javascript, not proprietary plugins like Silverlight and Flash.

"IE8 feels like a modern browser."

You must be joking! Modern browsers have fast javascript interpreters and implement standards as far as possible. IE just picks and chooses which standards to support in order to help Microsofts other products. The javascript is slow and very buggy. IE 8 beta 2 is nowhere near the standard for a modern web browser, hopefully the RC will have less regressions since IE7.

Chips : AFAIK the Opera case is about subverting HTML standards or something, the bundling issue has been mostly resolved by allowing the default browser to be changed.

There are 6 parts of IE, which parts cause Windows to not run properly? 3 of them are vital for a Windows machine to connect to the internet, 1 could be removed but would break a lot of third party apps and 2 could be removed but are not involved deeply in Windows and are not even loaded into memory if you do not start iexplore.exe.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312(VS.85).aspx

I kind of side with Chips in some respects. I remember during Windows Vista's development, IE 7 for Vista and IE 7 for prior versions of Windows were being developed in tandem. I suspect that Microsoft might want to repeat a similar experience at least for the first beta of Windows 7. The IE Team might want to see how the OS and the browser impact each others development if it introduces any regressions that the IE Team can have fixed before it goes final. Also, I remember IE 7 being released a few months ahead of Windows Vista, IE 8 in March 2009, Windows 7 RTM June 2009, GA August 2009? I believe the IE team wants to have the OS and Browser released within months of each other. Sounds like a plan.

Internet Explorer will always be behind the curve, simply because it's bringing no revenue in to Microsoft, hence there's no incentive to really put resources into it. Same with Apple's Safari.

Contrast this with the Mozilla Foundation, which is making a comfortable living off Firefox. In fact, Firefox is probably the _only_ Web browser that actually has a sustainable revenue model, which is why it's become so successful.

(Yes, Virginia, Free Software _can_ be a commercial success.)

IE indirectly brings money to Microsoft via sales of developer tools.

OSX would not be much good if the browser constantly locked up and crashed. It is part of the user experience, so does contribute towards revenue and overall appeal.

By your reconing, Microsoft should have never bothered making IE at all. IE is behind the curve because, like so many MS products, it was rushed out to kill the competition but falls over because it was poorly designed and became bloated and hard to work on. IE7 development was mostly farmed out to India, you get what you pay for I suppose.

I think you all are overlooking the fact that a hell of a lot of people are used to the blue icon for internet.
They want that one back. No matter what the implications are. Change is not something a lot of people are looking for.

Obviously that is flawed reasoning but it's a fact.

It is really a tip not a rumor.

IE 8 to release in 2009?

Meh.

is IE still around? does anyone still use IE?

The only reason IE has any kind of significant share is because it is baked into Windows. I would love to see what the browser war would look like if Windows came with no browser and you had to seek out your own. I'll bet Firefox would have a good 75% piece of the pie.

Spencer says:

"You may think it would be fun to extract IE from Windows, but it is not advised. Your best bet is to install the browser of your choice and use it as your default browser. Completely removing IE from Windows does not speed up Windows, in fact it could slow it to a crawl."
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Have to agree, its not fun, as Microsoft did make it a little complicated. As far as the speeding up part, at least with XP, I do believe it is faster, and far more stable without IE, at least in XP Pro. But then I also removed Media Player and Outlook along with IE.
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Spencer also says:
"Removing IE also alters and/or removes important Windows system files and could make your OS more prone to crashes and hangs."
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I found that to be totally wrong, in fact, XP suffered far less from stability problems once I removed IE, Media Player and Outlook. It was a nice improvement, removing those, in almost every way.
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Lastly Spencer says:
"In fact, Windows itself makes it easy to "remove" IE from Windows. You go to add/remove Windows components and uncheck IE. It will remove shortcuts and remove IE as the default. This is a much safer and sounder route than actually extracting IE from Windows."
--------------------------------------------------
You right about MS making it "EASY" to uninstall. EXCEPT for the fact, that it will not install that way, unless you turn off Windows file protection in XP. Also, Windows will not delete the IE folder in programs files folder as well, so you must manually delete that, but that is a common bug in windows. In Vista you must do even more (I am told) to remove IE, you must turn off UAC, and as administrator take ownership of certain folders as well. So the point here, is that its not "easy." And then when you turn back on windows file protection, it will reinstall IE from the cab files on your hard drive unless you manually edit those. It will also ask for you install cd, if it cannot find IE in the cab files, so you cannot give it that, unless you have edited that and made a slipstreamed install cd without IE. Auto updates will also reinstall IE for you, if you have this "feature" turned on. So Microsoft made it anything but easy.
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I think Microsoft uses these applications to do a lot of the spying on its users, which is probably why there is improvements once they are gone.

As far as other programs depending on IE, so far I have surprisingly only found one. Quickbooks 2008 or was it 2007, had to have IE, even with Firefox installed spoofing as IE. Quickbooks did some kind of check for IE installed, and would not let you run it without it being there, and it was completely unnecessary. Media Player however, you will find a lot of other programs depend or pigback on it. My solution was to install Mplayer (or SMplayer) which was ported over from Linux, and that worked very well. All the open source software I have added to XP seem to not need IE, Media Player, or Outlook.

@chips
"I think Microsoft uses these applications to do a lot of the spying on its users, which is probably why there is improvements once they are gone."

Do you have any evidence to support this theory? Any at all?

I've heard rumours about Google collecting information on people who use its software. I don't know how much is true and how much is pure speculation, but it's something that several people seem to believe. However, this is the first time I've heard of the idea of Microsoft using IE to spy on people.

In fact, I'm not aware of Microsoft spying on anyone.

I usually make it a point to never respond to one of the Softies or sock puppets of Andre. But once in awhile;

Microsoft spying on you?!?!
xtremesystems.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-23451.html

Is Internet Explorer 7 Spying on Me?
dailycupoftech.com/is-internet-explorer-7-spying-on-me/

Microsoft spying again?
forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=603860&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Microsoft: Of Course We Spy On Our Web Users. But Not As Much As The Other Guys
alleyinsider.com/2008/8/microsoft-of-course-we-spy-on-our-web-users-but-not-as-much-as-the-other-guys
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Just a few, lot of hits if one looks.

@chips
Thank you. Not for the implication that I'm a sock puppet. I'm perfectly capable of being opinionated on my own. ;) I don't know Andre, either personally or from online communication, so I'm definitely not his puppet.

But thank you for giving me what I asked for. You say you generally don't respond, but how can you get a meaningful discussion if you don't?

The first address doesn't seem to work. The second and third seemed to be people not quite sure what was going on. The second link in particular seemed to be as much speculation as fact ("Again, not being a programmer, I do not know the purpose of this link but it could definitely be used to report back to Microsoft."). I'm not an expert on legalities of privacy laws, but it seems that the spying described by the blogger is a check that people aren't running illegal copies of Windows. If that's all that's being done, I don't see much problem, but you're entitled to disagree. It doesn't seem to be "a lot" of spying, as you put it. But I have nothing to do with IE other than using it as a browser, so I don't know what, if any, it does.

As for the fourth link, at least the officials are honest about it. They admit to tailoring adverts based on web activity. From my perspective, it seems that you're going to get spying from Google and Yahoo even if you avoid it from MS.

Still, I asked for evidence and you offered it. You've certainly given me something to think about.

@Jess Meats :
The first link you will have to add back in http://www. before you copy and paste the rest of it back in, and then it works, I just checked it. Also I did use the word "or," when I said "Softies or sock puppets." I take you at your word that you work for MS, and even though I do not go to your link, I do know that it is owned and hosted by MS. So you get respect from me right up front, for admitting who you work for. But, you forgive me, but I have seen to many who write in here defending the mother ship, who most likely are sock puppets of Andre.

Which brings us to your purpose writing in here, which would appear to be the same purpose as Andre, but at least, you are, so far, more polite, and a little more thoughtful than he, so far. Mostly I do not choose to reply to those, who like Andre have a motive to protect and defend the profits of MS. Also, your tactics of focusing on one little item on my comment, is the same as Andre. Not saying you are Andre, in fact I really think you are not, but your motives are the same.

My motives in posting comments on blogs - any blogs, whether they're in any way related to technology or not - is the same as most people's: I have an opinion. I have the same right to voice my opinion as everyone else. My opinion may be coloured slightly by the fact I work within Microsoft, but it's still my opinion and as valid as everyone else's.

No one is paying me to comment on blogs. It's not in my job description. I was making comments before I signed a job contract with MS. My opinion is my own.

I focused on one aspect of your comment because that was the one I disagreed with and wanted clarification of. If I had a strong opinion on the rest, I would say something about the rest. I try and make a point not to get into an argument where I don't have enough facts to make a case. If I'm tempted - I ask for facts. I'm not going to defend some aspect of MS I know nothing about just for the sake of it.

The fact that MS gives me my pay checks matters less than the fact I'm a human being who likes to voice my opinions and get into a discussion with those whose opinion differs from my own.

Jess Meats (MS employee says):
"My motives in posting comments on blogs - any blogs, whether they're in any way related to technology or not - is the same as most people's: I have an opinion. I have the same right to voice my opinion as everyone else. My opinion may be coloured slightly by the fact I work within Microsoft, but it's still my opinion and as valid as everyone else's."
----------------------------------------------------
Ok Jess, if you say so, and while that could be, your job description at Micro$oft is "Microsoft: Partner Technology Specialist," is it not? Which is sort of an "MS Evangelist," (or shill, or salesperson) to compare MS products in a favorable light to that of open source, isn't it? Looking into my cystal ball, I see a whole MS course for Partner Technology Specialists to highlight the differences between open source and commercial software, isn't that interesting? Amazing what one can find out, isn't it?

This should be a good test for you here, as there are a few advocates of open source and Linux here among the commentators here, including to some degree myself.

But Jess, a word of warning, or two. A few years ago, there was a Microsoft employee that took a picture of Mac computers and posted it on his website, and got fired for that. Be careful what you say here on MS Watch, and never try to agree with what I say, as that can also get your fired. I have nothing against you or Andre personally, and believe you are most likely two different people. But it is not my purpose to get anyone fired from MS, as times are tuff, and better paying jobs, like the ones from MS are hard to come by, so be careful, your bosses are not so forgiving.