Unbundling Internet Exploder from Norton Antivirus

[kopfjaeger]

Ave, Techae!

I got Norton Antivirus 2002 bundled with a motherboard, but it refused to load without Internet Explorer being on the harddrive.

I bought Norton Antivirus 2003 as a standalone CD (you would have thought I would have learned, right?) and, again, it ceased loading when I declined to install Internet Exploder onto my harddrive.

Nowhere on the CD that I bought does it say that I **have** to load a browser to make it do what it is supposed to do. The surprise happened only after I broke the shrinkwrap and slipped it into the CD-ROM drive.

Bill Gatus of Borg's organization has already gotten into trouble and is subject to a consent decree in unbundling possibly the most patched, bloated and dangerously vulnerable browser on the market from its' similarly bloated and vulnerable operating system.

How can it be then, that Norton demands that IE be installed on your machine in order to give you what you've paid for? ("No, honestly, can I just have the $ex **without** the herp@s?")

Has anyone heard of this state of affairs being commented on in the legal / business / political arena? Is there a workaround that fools Norton AV into thinking IE is resident, but really not?

In the alternative, are there comparable freeware antivirus packages available?


Thanks in advance.

K.J.

[muno]

How on earth did you turn it that way that what symantec does is microsofts problem?

It is a feature by design of symantec that they require IE, so either you install it or change to some other product.

In the same sentence you say 'the most patched---the most vulnerable', so neither is good, they patch their browser, bad, they won't patch it, bad.

Obviously norton av uses some components from ie so it's required, and it's pretty hard to have a functioning os if you completely eradicate ie - as it's a core component of windows. Even if you have removed most of it, you can probably still open up explorer.exe and type an url in the window, and it will open fine.
Here's the requirements -> http://www.symantec.com/nav/nav_9xnt/sys_req.html

[kopfjaeger]

I worked in antitrust and M&A in Washington, D.C. for five years. The way the industry works, and was brought out in the antitrust case against MS, is that MS is the 800-lb gorilla of the OS industry.

What may not be up front, but can be elicited over what has come out in public documents over the past several years is that if someone wants to circulate their software, it had better work with Windows.

From a practical standpoint, this makes sense, but the way it has come out, the word "better" has been bolded and underlined by MS. Symantec could easily have coded their product to work without IE. Proof -- the 2001 version of Symantec Norton AV sails blissfully along, unencumbered by IE. Why do the 2002 and 2003 versions suddenly demand the inclusion of IE in order to operate?

IE can easily be parsed from the OS and is not truly 'integral' as demonstrated by 'IE eradicator.' http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html The antitrust case against MS has brought that out. http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f202100/202111.htm MS came out with IE in response to the threat by Netscape Navigator. It offered it for free when NS cost about $30. Moreover, IE became the default browser pre-loaded on many OEM off-the-shelf machines.

In addition to all that, Windows is a bloated, vulnerable, patchy OS. To hold otherwise requires ignoring what has been widely discussed over the past several years in forums such as SlashDot and Wired.com, along with numerous vulnerability warnings being issued with respect to MSIE.

Google these: Internet Explorer Warning Vulnerability

You'll get tons of hits
http://news.com.com/Exploit+code+mak...3-5439370.html

You see now why I don't want IE anywhere **near** my machine?

Nonetheless, Windows is still the world's dominant OS and we have to work with it until other competing OS's, such as Linux, in all its' various incarnations, reach widespread circulation. -- But Windows is Windows and IE is IE.

I still use Windows, but don't want IE, kapierst???

This discussion could fill harddrives and I will not belabor the issue here. I don't have the time to enter a debate on this issue.

The call of the question, once again, was: is there a work-around or a freeware alternative?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Thanks in advance,

K.J.