Other applications that are not primarily for web browsing, such as
Intuit's Quicken and QuickBooks,
AOL,
Winamp, and
RealPlayer, use the rendering engine to provide a limited-functionality "mini" browser within their own user interfaces. On Windows, components of Internet Explorer are also used in
Windows Explorer, the
operating system shell that provides the default
file system browsing and desktop services. For example, folder views in Windows Explorer on versions of Windows prior to
Windows XP utilize IE's
DHTML processing abilities; they are essentially little web pages.
Active Desktop technology is another example. MSHTML was, until Outlook 2007, also used to render
HTML portions of email messages in
Microsoft Outlook and
Outlook Express email clients (Outlook 2007 now uses
Microsoft Word to render HTML e-mail). This integration is an often-exploited "back door", since the Internet Explorer components make available more of the functionality within the HTML code. Microsoft Windows also supports
HTML Applications, computer programs written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and bear a .hta
filename extension. They run with HTML Application Host, which is a plain Internet Explorer shell without any GUI elements around it. ==See also==