On November 2, 2002 12:02 am, Ender wrote:
If you expect internet explorer to work, you are GOING to have to have at least shdocvw,shlwapi set native,builtin. That way they are not required, but if IE is installed and those DLLs exist, you will need to use the native versions. I really can't imagine ANY way we could create a builtin version of those two dll's which will work with -all- internet explorer versions, as the DLL's change horribly between revisions and even service packs. I think urlmon suffers from the same fate, but I'm not certain.
If this is the only tweak required for IE6, I think it's acceptable since IE is such a high visibility app. However, we have to be very careful with these things because this way lies madness. So if other apps require such tweaks, they will not make our Gold list. A separate section, with instructions is more appropriate.
We can not go down the path of customizing dlls overrides for every app out there, because sooner rather than later we will encounter contradicting requirements. It's better IMO to have a default config that has the default overrides to "builtin, native", so that we encourage people to fix applications to work in this configuration (maybe IE is the big exception, but I am not convinced).
I would say that with 0.8/0.9 we should say we support so many apps (and they don't have to be IE or Word), with _NO_ native DLLs. If these apps are apps like FTP Commander, WinZip, Xnews, etc., we would have delivered an exciting release. In fact, heavyweights like IE, and Word should come supported in later releases, to refresh excitement. :)