[Jim Cullinan of MS]:"If you have five different browsers on the PC and four of them are non-Microsoft, those four will appear there and you will have a choice to pick the default," Cullinan said. But software developers must write programs "so that they can register here" for the choices to appear. In the case where there is no third- party middleware installed, Microsoft software would appear in the list.

Unless we're gravely mistaken, this points to a characteristically Microsoft-ish implementation of the apparently simple task of shoving Microsoft software into the background somewhere and installing Navigator, Opera or Mozilla instead. "We're telling software developers how to register for this," Cullinan went on, so, in order to get themselves in on the grand middleware add/remove express, Microsoft's rivals are going to have to join what sounds rather like a Microsoft mini-developer program, participate in the SP1 beta and for all we know have the APIs related to the new control system disclosed to them. Does the new control system count as a new mini-UI, one wonders?