[aquova]

Slightly tangential, but does this mean that Wine prefixes will no longer need to include Internet Explorer? If you ever go digging through a Wine prefix's Program Files, there are a handful of default Windows applications, including IE and Windows Media Player. I've never been really sure why my Steam library is filled with a dozen copies of IE, but I'm curious if they will still be added.

[netr0ute]

Ironically, Wine has better support for older programs than Windows itself. Therefore, why would they remove backwards compat and get rid of a major selling point?

[iggldiggl]

Well, there's Internet Explorer as the complete browser, but there's also the rendering engine behind it that's still needed to power the web browser controls used by all sorts of applications. If I'm understanding things right by default Wine emulates it using Gecko, but you can still install the original Microsoft DLLs for maximum compatibility.

Likewise on Windows itself, Microsoft will have to continue shipping IE's rendering engine for backwards compatibility with all those programs using the old web view control (as well as Edge's hidden IE11-mode).