Bowing to legal pressure by the EU, Microsoft essentially washed its hands of the anti-competitive issue by shipping the European editions of Windows 7 without Internet Explorer, or any other pre-installed browser. Purchasers will be responsible for downloading the browser of their choice after they’ve installed the new operating system.

So, the natural question: How are you supposed to download a browser if you don’t start off with a browser to get onto the Internet in the first place?

At that point, users have a system with no browser at all. So if they want Firefox or Opera or any other browser, they have no easy way to get it. For its part, Microsoft plans to make it as easy as possible for them to get IE. It will offer it via CD-ROMs at retail stores and via FTP, an old file downloading technique that has been largely sidelined due to modern browsers.

Yeah, I realize there are any number of ways around this; using an external disk (USB, CD, whatever) to transfer the new browser’s installation onto the hard drive is the simplest. But that’s not the point. The vast majority of users aren’t tech-savvy enough to pull even this off. For them, that “e” icon (or fox, or whatever) basically equals “the Internet”. It’s one thing to offer them a choice of different look-and-feel access points to the Web; it’s another to make them jump through hoops just to get to the Web at all.

Maybe a special class of Euro computer users will emerge: They’ll never install a browser at all, but instead limit themselves to just email, chat, and other limited-purpose client programs when getting online. It’d be curious to see just how you can negotiate modern life without a Web browser, actually.