Windows Could Lose Media Player in Europe?

Chris Gondek writes "If Microsoft cannot settle an antitrust case brought by European Union regulators, the company may be ordered to remove Windows Media Player as an integrated feature of the dominant Windows operating system, at least for personal computers sold in Europe. The European Commission also could order Microsoft to include rival media players with Windows to make those products as easy for users to access as Microsoft's own music and video player."

Comments

Re:That is wrong..

[LostCluster]

Because the ulitmate sin in anti-trust law is the use of a monopoly in one thing to try to move into another thing where there used to be competition.

Being forced to include third-party software is simply the punitive action to punish MS for a past misdeed and help the companies who were the victim of that cheating.

Re:This won't change a thing.

[Nothinman]

That's not entirely true. Sure all the HTML rendering functions used by Windows help, Explorer, etc are implemented in MSHTML.dll but it's not impossible to register a different HTML renderer. Infact a while back someone wrote a Gecko ActiveX control that did all of that, you could register it and all those APIs would then call on Gecko for the rendering instead of MSHTML. But IIRC it was a huge PITA to keep the control up to date, and that combined with the general lack of interest made him stop maintaining it.

Re:this isn't the answer

[Knetzar]

Ummm...I don't know how you installed Firefox, but there's an option (tools->options->general->make default browser) to make it your default browser. On my windows box when I click a link anywhere, it opens Firefox.

Re:This is rediculous...

[Armadillo007]

OK.... But there is Enterprise Edition that is lean, clean and free from the bloatware sydrome: http://forms.real.com/rnforms/products/tools/red/ Just enter nonsense in the form.

Re:this isn't the answer

[Hektor_Troy]

Funny thing ...

Try that for kicks. Then open Explorer (your file browser); in the address field type in "http://slashdot.org" and hey presto - Internet Explorer opens Slashdot ...

I thought you said you removed it?

No, what you do is remove the SHORTCUTS for it. Not quite the same thing now, is it?

Imagine if all programs were "uninstalled" like that. Your 2 GB $program would still take up 2 GB of space, that you can't reclaim, and it still takes up RAM. Not quite what I have in mind, when I uninstall programs ...