First, I never say IE was not integral - I said IE is not synounymous with Windows
While IE is not synonymous with Windows, you can't remove it. IE is integral. My heart is integral with me living but a heart is not synonymous with a human being.
Why do you want to remove it? Just don't use it. If you don't want to browse the Internet with IE, don't.
If you hate Microsoft - by all means use Linux or buy a Mac.
Which was my point. It is integral and without it, XP won't function.
If you hate Microsoft - by all means use Linux or buy a Mac.
See, that's where you misunderstand. I've been in the business since about 79. I was a teen in 79, but got a job feeding punch cards on weekends. See my FR profile if you wish to be nauseated. I personally support everything and I have a mandrake box here at the house.
I don't hate Microsoft. I do however have a userbase that I and my staff support. I'm moving them over to Firefox for general browsing and only IE when absolutely necessary. At some point in early/mid 2003, we were fighting spyware so much that it was taking 50% of the time of my staff to fix it. I got some of the heavy users(Researchers and fact finders) to switch to Firebird(beta .7 of what became Firefox). The problems evaporated. I now know how to clean just about everthing and how to lock down a machine. Back then, even trusted zones would get spyware sites added.
At this point in time, anyone in the business cannot possible suggest people use Internet Explorer unless absolutely required. IE has access to the local zone and many exploits found run in the local zone and completely hose the PC. No matter how hard they try, malware authors will never be able to cause the havoc to FF as they do to IE.
That's not quite good enough. The IE engine is not only used by IE, but by other parts of Windows and many other programs to the point where where you often don't even know you're running IE. You'd have to not use IE, plus research all Windows features and applications that use the engine, and make sure not to use those either.
However, the fact that IE is so bad has caused some vendors to move away from it. For example, Adobe replaced IE as it's rendering engine in GoLive with the Opera engine.