PC Week labs, TechWeb, and various other independent groups within the computer industry have decided to take Microsoft to task and find out just how hard it really is to remove Internet Explorer from Windows 95 OSR-2. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice this week, Microsoft said that the removal of Internet Explorer DLLs from OSR-2 would make the operating system unusable.
As it turns out, that's not true.
PC Week labs, for example, tested the OSR-2 build of Windows 95 that Microsoft ships to OEMs. By simply editing four lines of code in one setup file, PC Week was able to make OSR-2 install just fine...without Internet Explorer 3.0. In PC Week's own words, "this modification had no impact on the operating system's capabilities or performance. Instead of the install script overwriting Windows 95 DLLs with files from IE 3.0, the original Windows 95 DLLs remained intact."
More importantly, key Windows 95 OSR-2 functionality, such as the FAT32 file system, remained intact and worked fine without IE
