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Dell Pre-Installing Firefox in UK
seizer writes "Blake Ross, creator of Firefox, has confirmed on his blog that Dell are now shipping Firefox on all desktop and laptop machines in the UK. While rumours had been floating around before this, and UK buyers had been reporting that 1.0.6 came pre-installed, this is the first official confirmation of Dell's decision. Is the US next?"
Definately good news, but if it's not the default browser the impact will likely be limited. Most people will use whatever's the default.
-Is it installed like the rest of their nagware? (e.g. buried in the menus)
-Is it the default browser?
-Will it remain the default browser?
-Is there an icon on the desktop? (still will probably not switch the trained to click the "e" people.)
In one way it's very good news.
I don't think it changes much though once IE7 is available. The IE7 hype for a feature set that Mozilla browsers already have will be deafening.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It's quite funny. Your type seem to cry "anti-competitive practice!" and "monopoly!" when Microsoft chooses to include a product of great quality in their operating system suite, however, look at you now. "I doubt they remove IE on the system". Heh. It's alright when theoretical anti-competitive practice favours Firefox, but not Internet Explorer?
That's because Firefox isn't leveraging an existing monopoly in one area to gain ground for another (usually inferior) product. That's anti-competitive behavior. For example, if Firefox firmly controlled 95% of the browser market, and told OEMs "We won't allow you to install our product if you install another browser, and unless you bundle Thunderbird with it", that would be anti-competitive monopolistic behavior. If the OEM simply decides not to include what they consider to be inferior but competing products of their own accord, that's the free market in action.
If MS simply bundled apps with Windows and OEMs left the other products out, I would be quite happy with that. I'm glad they've finally decided to give anti-virus another go for a number of reasons. It's when they tell OEMs, "If you want Windows, you can't install X" that they really need to be backhanded.