Microsoft and browsers: just not giving up
allthingsd reported last month on the latest round of the Browser Wars. In essence, Microsoft have -- yet again -- gone back on something that was considered pretty important to the EC. They settled in 2009 on an antitrust case and agreed to put a browser choice screen (BCS) onto new Windows 7 computers so that the users weren't stuck with Internet Explorer straight off the bat.
Trouble has flared up again because Microsoft "missed delivering" the BCS software in some computers. That should mean that when firing up a new machine with Windows 7 SP1, you're no longer asked which browser you want to use. Having recently bought a bunch of new PCs and laptops for our office, we got to try this out first hand yesterday. It's even worse than you might imagine: the Internet Explorer that's shipping on factory installed Windows 7 Pro SP1 from Dell, is crippled so that it cannot be used to install another web browser. The download functionality on the Firefox and Chrome websites is broken by it, with the Firefox download page not rendering properly, and the Chrome "accept and install" button not working at all.
With five minutes of fiddling we couldn't figure out how IE was locking these installs down, or get it to stop. Perhaps some sort of security settings, or restriction of JavaScript. Short of using telnet to forge an HTTP request to download the Chrome installer, there wasn't a obvious way around it, so we settled for downloading both browsers on another computer and copying the installers on over the network. Who would have thought it could be made so hard?
Comments
Very Interesting. I had not heard anything about this, but I've always wondered how frustrating, a slap-in-the-face, it must be to see fresh installs come online, start "talking" to the registration/update server(s)- Yea, a new M$ junkie they rejoice. Then Internet Explorer start-up for the first time (with Bing as the default search engine and MSN as the default homepage), and the first query submitted to bing is for the phrase "Firefox download". Next the newly registered machine goes silent on Bing, because the default search engine is changed to Google. Firefox gets installed, IE is closed and hardly ever used again. I don't know that Bill actually watches me do that, but it makes me chuckle anyway. However, that is not what I wanted to comment on. If you don't mind, I'll make some conjecture about how they accomplished blocking the site. Any chance you captured an image of those systems that, time permitting, one of us might do some investigation? > the Firefox download page not rendering properly, and the > Chrome "accept and install" button not working at all Did I usderstand you correctly that you were able to get binaries down, despite aforementioned rendering problems, and those binaries still were being thwarted from completing a successful execution/install? I wonder if this was just buggy IE code? Beyond the failure to render the webpages, IE has a mechanism that writes an ADS to any binary that it downloads certain "zones". If they couldn't render a webpage, it seems quite possible that they could have malformed the binary as they wrote the ADS data into that downloaded file. If not that, then maybe there was a misconfiguration (per the OEP or sofrware manufacturer) where the UAC invocation was incorrect or incomplete. Afterall, that was the major failure of Vista- an incorrectly implemented partition (call it "incomplete" to be nice and ignore the fact that they still sold it to millions of people) between privileged applications and unprivileged applications. Anyway, awesome site you have here. I'll be lurking a bit... so, I'll see you guys around. Until then next time....
Hi Guy, thanks for your comment and following the blog. It turns out the boxes shipped with Javascript disabled -- or rather broken -- on the IE builds. We had to remove and reinstall IE in order to be able to get anything else installed!