After some horrendous problems with the Microsoft Vista, the Windows 7 which is tasked to recover the lost faith that Microsoft users have had due to inconveniences brought about, are getting quite a number of reprieves including the potential removal of the Internet Explorer 8 browser just in case you don’t like it. Microsoft has confirmed, via its Engineering Windows 7 blog, that IE8 among other significant features will be user-removable.
A “Windows Features” dialog box will allow users to remove programs they don’t want, although the programs themselves are more buried than actually removed. I guess Microsoft heard the million cries of annoyance when users had to put in their install disc just to get some service installed: now everything will be installed initially and then unwanted components will be “removed,” but ready for reinstallation in a heartbeat.
The “big ones” you can remove are:
- Windows Media Player
- Windows Media Center
- Windows DVD Maker
- Internet Explorer 8
- Windows Search
There are lots of other services, games, and so on as you can see in the big list (right), but I think we’re all thankful that Microsoft has made these main five programs totally optional. It should be noted that any dependencies or shared services will not be affected by removal, so you won’t have to worry about DVDs not working in other programs because you removed the Windows version, or the like.