Because there is quite literally no benefit from N editions whatsoever. The legal reason mentioned above is the European Union rules of "not forcing something on customers and creating a kind of monopoly". Somewhere thereabouts. The removed media features and codecs do not impact performance, not even in a marginal way. I used to think the opposite many years ago until I bit the pillow and went through clean installs of both N and full Pro on my Ivy Bridge laptop. No game the laptop could run was impacted by the N difference. At all. After gaming performance, there's (to my knowledge) zero privacy impact. The only thing you gain is maybe a little bit of storage space, which imo is pointless when you're met with the drawbacks: - you'll have difficulties connecting phones - some software relies on the built-in media codecs to run - I personally ran into issues while coding in C# back in university - unknown to me other issues(maybe someone can chip in with some personal experience) Just install a regular Home/Pro/Ult/Ent edition and forget about it.
Thank you for the info and link. Would with "E" edition be any similar but different difficulties as with "N" (I believe not), just had to ask.
N = no media player and codec / E = no internet explorer ( break many software because use embedded ie )
No. Contrary to N, IE can be installed at any moment. And only the IE application is missing, not the underlying Trident engine. No. The Trident web engine is still there, just the browser application is not. Trident is still needed for the Active Desktop. That's why it still takes the very same updates like the non-E Edition, including web engine updates. E was just created for disputes about the bundled browser, not the engine.