Windows 7: The 7 Technologies It's Killed

Marc Andreessen's Netscape was the first commercial (though free) browser for the World Wide Web. Shortly after Windows 95's release, which didn't even support TCP/IP as its default networking protocol, Microsoft issued an update that included its Internet Explorer browser based on intellectual property obtained when it purchased Spyglass. Netscape tumbled from its perch, ultimately purchased by AOL in a tax-free stock swap before fading away completely.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

Microsoft first shipped its Internet Mail and News as a freeware e-mail and Usenet news client, but then renamed it Outlook Express in 1997, bundling it with IE4 -- and not surprisingly bringing IE into feature parity with Netscape.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

The Internet was well under way with a healthy ecosystem of third-party HTML editors and site-creation tools when Microsoft debuted its free FrontPage site editor as part of Windows NT 4.0 Server. The Windows HTML editor marketplace lost much diversity after that, never achieving the product selection of rival development platform Mac OS X.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

Expertelligence's WebBase was the first self-contained Web application platform for Windows, combining a development environment, scripting language, database access engine, and HTTP server in a single program that would run on any version of Windows. Microsoft officials visited Expertelligence in 1996, then retired to Redmond, where Microsoft eventually bundling its own scripting language, ASP, as part of its Internet Information Explorer (IIS) HTTP server. The free ASP/IIS combo rapidly eclipsed all third-party Web application products.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

ActiveX is Microsoft's proprietary plug-in architecture for IE, shipping with IE3 to counter Sun's open and free Java Applet technology. ActiveX gives developers deeper access to the underlying Window OS at the expense of totally eliminating portability, because ActiveX runtime support is not available in any browser other than IE and derivative products such as Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

AutoPatcher, a free patch aggregation and distribution tool created by system administrator Jason Kelley, let users patch multiple Windows systems without slamming their Internet connections or getting infected during the patch process. The utility was a system administration staple until Aug. 29, 2007, when Microsoft lawyers shut down the project in a single day with a cease-and-desist letter.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7

Windows 7 beta testers noticed that third-party codecs -- video decoders for specific streaming media protocols, such as MPEG-4 -- that ran fine under Vista became strangely non-operational under the new OS. It turns out that Windows 7 preempts third-party codecs, favoring codecs built into the OS, and Windows 7 has more built-in codecs than any previous Windows release. Users wanting their favorite third-party codecs to work again must perform some system configuration gymnastics to get them back.

* Read the full story on Microsoft's roadkill on the journey to Windows 7

* Get the key details on Windows 7 in InfoWorld's 21-page "Windows 7 Deep Dive" PDF report

* Follow InfoWorld's ongoing coverage of Windows 7