Windows 7 European Edition Development Implications

Question

Apparently in Europe, Microsoft plan to ship Windows 7 without IE8 preinstalled. Many of the commercial apps I have been a developer on have made use of IE in some way or other, so I am concerned about whether we need to now install IE8 as part of our application installs.

Does this mean that applications making use of...

• The WindowsForms WebBrowser component
• The WPF WebBroswer control
• No touch deploy
• IE as an ActiveX control
• XPS Viewer
• possibly other developer API's / COM components?

...will no longer work out of the box on Win 7 in Europe? Or have MS found a sneaky way to leave core IE components in the OS, and just removed the "browser" application?

Answer 1

While I have nothing to back what I'm saying, it's hard to believe that they've removed the whole MSHTML back-end components. Many apps are out there that are using it and they'll fail to run without it. I think they have just removed the browser application (just like what happens when you uncheck IE8 in Windows 7 Programs and Features).