European Version of Windows 7 will not come with Internet Explorer

The next version of Microsoft's operating system will reach the European markets without having the Internet Explorer browser pre-installed. The decision was made to address the concerns of the European Union and anti-competitive practices by the company.

Internet Explorer will be installed by both customers and manufacturers of computers that have Windows pre-installed on their equipment, but will be part of the applications included in the operating system - something that has not happened since the company decided to integrate the browser in Windows 98.

Include the Internet Explorer 4 on Windows operating system was a move that permitu Microsoft to win the "battle of the browsers" the end of the 1990s, thus relegating the Netscape browser to a remote second.

The European Commission said in January that it would investigate whether the fact that Internet Explorer is integrated in Windows could be a practice of unfair competition. The decisions in this area not usually favorable to Microsoft.

Internet Explorer is currently the most used browser in the world, but has been losing ground to Firefox, Netscape maintained a substitute of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which has financing from Google (which recently launched the Chrome browser ).