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

Straight from the horse’s mouth from Microsoft: Best ISV practices for Windows 7 E:

What general impacts of Windows 7 E editions have you seen on applications
– especially ones that rely on the
WebOC?

During our application compatibility
testing, we’ve found that the vast
majority of applications work on
Windows 7 E editions without any
changes. This includes applications
that use many of the Internet Web
Platform embedding methods (including
WebBrowser control, hosting Trident,
and HTML Help).

My Windows application (WPF, Win Forms, Java, etc.) uses the Web
Browser control. Is there any
compatibility issue?

Everything should work as expected.
However, we’ve seen some issues when
applications depend directly on a
specific browser. In particular, if
while using the Web Browser control,
you allow the application to open new
windows that do not respect the user’s
default browser choice, you may see
some issues.