IE has lost its tentacles

[Dufusyte]

When IE4 was installed onto, say, Win95, IE would wrap its tentacles over every part of the shell, modifying the task bar, modifying the local explorer windows, modifying the desktop, and basically infecting its bloated self into every corner it could.

Apparently, with a little help from the DOJ, MS has considerably toned down IE, and now the latest IE is a well behaved citizen: I installed IE5.5 on a Win95 system and it did not modify the taskbar, did not modify the local explorer windows, did not try to force an active desktop, and it even allowed its own desktop icon to be deleted without resorting to a registry hack.

IE has been tamed. It now seems to be a mere web browser, and no longer tries to be an OS upgrade. I was happy to see that it did not sap performance from regular OS operations, nor from games.

In the past I have posted against what I called "the bloated IE4/5 shell", but now it appears that IE5.5 no longer bloats the Win95 shell at all.

I have made my peace with IE5.5, and I still have the lean and mean OSR2 shell. In the famous last words of one Anandtech poster, "My war is over."

 

[emjem]

Well Dufusyte, step up to ME and you can start a new war. IE has it's roots everywhere! It's hard for me to see where IE ends and the OS starts. It seems to me that IE has eaten windows and now is the os.

 

[Dufusyte]

WinME has been dumbed down and/or crippled in order to be child-proof. There is no easy access to a DOS prompt. You cannot rename the "Program Files" directory, etc. It's everything you ever wanted in the 9x kernel with less control. Definitely not for the power-users.

Win98/SE has a fairly bloated shell, with all the "View as Web Page" stuff in the local explorer windows (yes, you can turn it off), the thingie icons in the task bar (yes they are useful, but remember that every additional "feature" is an additional ounce of bloat), the lurking Active Desktop (be sure to turn that off too)... It comes with a lot of flab, most of which can be turned off.

Win95 OSR2 is the lean mean gaming machine OS of choice. It is like a bare-bones OS, and thus it runs light and runs fast. I was wary of installing IE on it, because I knew it would bloat up the shell, but when I installed IE5.5 in one of my experimental back-up Windows directories, I was pleasantly surprized to see that IE5.5 left the OSR2 totally alone, and did not wrap its tentacles everywhere.

I found that there are a couple of programs that require IE4/5 for installation, such as the 3dfx Tools, and other odds and ends. Since some programs were requiring IE4/5, I decided to try an experimental install on my home gaming rig. IE5.5 was well behaved, and I get the same fps in games as before, so IE5.5 can stay. I do suspect, however, that prior versions of IE would have taken over the OSR2 shell and sapped a fair deal of performance from my rig.

As for Win98/2k, I will only make the transition when programs no longer run on my OSR2. I generally only "upgrade" software/hardware when new programs can no longer run on my current setup.

 

[Plantanthera]

Wow!

I'm with you on Winblows98/ME, and the bloated Active Desktop of IE shell.

I'm still running Win95 & suffering with Nutscrape as a browser, because I wanted to stay away from the unstable Active Desktop Shell.

Thanks for the head up...I'm currently down loading IE5.5 to install on my 95 client as I'm typing this

 

[AndyHui]

Only IE4 ships the Active Desktop and Desktop Update Component.

IE5 and IE5.5 do not have these components as part of the install, so there should be no problems with installing these versions. If you wanted the Desktop Update (ermm....yeah), you would have to install IE4 first before installing IE5.