Why it's a bad idea to make a browser part of the OS

There’s a post on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer blog describing the ridiculous series of steps IE users may have to go through if they decide they want to downgrade IE after installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. The logic works something like this:

• If you currently have IE6 installed on XPSP2, you can install XPSP3 and then upgrade to IE7, and you will be able to downgrade back to IE6 at any time by uninstalling IE7.
• If you currently have IE7 installed on XPSP2 and you upgrade to XPSP3, you will not be able to uninstall IE7 unless you first uninstall XPSP3, because doing so would result in your system running a version of IE6 older than the one that ships with XPSP3, which would in turn result in the destruction of the known universe.
• If you currently have IE8 beta 1 installed on XPSP2 and you upgrade to XPSP3, you will not be able to uninstall IE8, because that too would destroy the universe. Instead, Microsoft strongly recommends that you uninstall IE8 while running XPSP2, then upgrade to XPSP3, then reinstall IE8. They recommend it so strongly that they put it inside both a <b> tag and a <font> tag (and the <font> tag even has one of those fancy newfangled color attributes).

This, children, is why browsers should be standalone applications rather than part of an operating system. There’s probably also a lesson here about how you shouldn’t use a browser made by people who still think <font> tags are a pretty neat idea.