In the settlement-mandated app preferences dialog (in Win2k SP3), even as the confirmed IE-phobe switches to Mozilla with a sigh of satisfaction only the righteous can emit, the UI continues to be powered by the same evil browser the confirmed IE-phobe had fought all these years. I can almost hear the defense addressing Judge Kollar-Ketally: Yes, your honor, IE’s html renderer really is a system service. We use it to show dialogs. Accompanied by peals from laughter coming from Redmond …

Actually, here‘s an easy, compatible answer to folk wanting to embed a html renderer within Windows apps — Mozilla as an embeddable control that implements IWebBrowser2 — the same API IE exposes to AOL, Outlook, and many other apps. If only Netscape had created something like this around Netscape 3. Wonder if they had ever considered this idea seriously, though, or were too high on their “the browser is the OS” trip to take notice.