Microsoft Allows PC Users to Disable IE Browser

In a possible move to fend off action from the European Union, Microsoft Corp has allowed the tweaking of Windows 7’s setting in order to disable the Web browser Internet Explorer. Just a single check box will appear deep in the program of Windows 7, which will give a lot of watchers of the Microsoft Corporation a significant peek into how this software maker will plan to keep the regulators away. The company is concerned that the antitrust regulator of the European Union is going to mar their highly crucial software launch.

Soon to Hit the Shores

As the successor to the highly flawed Windows Vista, Windows 7 is not going to be within the reach of consumers until the following year. However there are more than a million individuals who are already neck-deep into testing the early versions of this new operating system. One pair of bloggers that had tinkered with the settings of this new operating system had ended up finding something that was not there before – and that is the ability to switch off the Internet Explorer browser which is the default browser of Microsoft. The company had recently lost a long-running fight with the antitrust regulators of the European Union back in 2007 because of the manner in which the former had bundled their media player software into the entire Windows OS. The dust had been far from settling when yet another claim was then filed – this time because of the IE’s place in the Windows OS. The Norwegian competitor of IE, Opera Software, had also claimed that such a practice by Microsoft will give it an unfair advantage.

Agreement by the EU

A preliminary decision was made in January and the European Union agreed. Ever since that time, the makers of open source browsers such as Google and Firefox had entered the browser market a mere six months ago and have done extensive work in order to provide even better evidence that Microsoft was working to stifle their competition. With regard to the dispute over the media player, the European Union had placed heavy fines on Microsoft and had forced it to come up with a version of their Windows OS that did not include the offending program in the package.

This time, however, Microsoft had ended up offering their check-box solution as a way to solve the predicament. The company had declined to release a comment last Friday regarding the connection between such check boxes and the preliminary decision made by the European Union. However, a recent quarterly filing showed that the European Commission may also order the PC makers to put in different browsers on their computer as a way of forcing Microsoft to disable their parts.