Slashdot Mirror
Opera Files EU Complaint Against Microsoft
A number of readers have sent word about Opera Software ASA's antitrust complaint against Microsoft filed with the EU. Here is Opera's press release on the filing. The company wants the EU to "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop" and to "require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities." The latter request makes this a case to watch. Will the Commissioner take the Acid2 test using IE7?
...it's the OEM. That part of the suit should be tossed immediately. Now, if MS has some highly restrictive distribution contract that stops the OEM's from installing anything else, then fine. Otherwise, that's a pointless thing to try and make MS do, since MS doesn't control what the OEM does.
for KDE to stop shipping with Konqueror.
Seriously, If you are selling or giving an OS, is it that bad to bundle a browser of your choosing?
If M$ bundled firefox,or opera, or even an ancient version of netscape, would there be such an uproar? This article is simply FUD.
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
Microsoft has every right to create a web browser and integrate it into their other products. It is no fundamentally different than Konqueror being the default browser within the KDE environment. If Dell and others feel comfortable distributing **Linux**, what makes you think they wouldn't distribute Opera and Firefox if there were a demand for that? The catch is, there isn't a demand for that because the very people who would use Opera and Firefox instead of IE wouldn't have any problems installing it on their own. The people that Opera is whining about not having access to, are largely the people who think that Internet Explorer is "The Internet."
In other news:
Network companies sue Microsoft for bundling TCP/IP.
Editor companies sue Microsoft for bundling Notepad and Wordpad.
Clock software companies sue Microsoft for bundling a clock on the desktop.
And so it goes...
This is just stupid. This is not 1990. A browser is an integral part of an operating system in 2007. It's a standardized document display application. The operating system depends on it being there.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Because it's impossible to download a file without a browser?
/rightdir/rightdir/
cmd
ftp
open ftp.mozilla.org
cd pub
cd
get Firefox.exe
Run Firefox.exe
????
Profit
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I won't go into wtf is wrong with that sentence, and no I didn't read the rest of the post after that but I assume it gets better: how could it get worse?
Sorry to be nitpickey, but IE and Opera are WEB browsers, not internet browsers. If anything, an internet browser would be a packet capture util like Ettercap.
You're a moron. The purpose of an OS is to provide the APIs to render data, and make available applications to the user. Video, audio, HTML, are all common types of data that are now universial. What you're literally arguing is that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to make a usable OS, because they make the most usable OS as judged by a market actually brimming with free alternatives. You can have lawyers create a world where OS's aren't allowed to provide their own text dialogues, which must be supplies by 3rd party venders too. Keep your own fucking dystopia to yourself.
Fuck Opera. Good for them, they can pass Acid 2, I don't want to deal with ads and I don't want to pay for their crap. The trouble that I have with websites, the few that are worth visiting freqently, isn't Acid 2 compliance, it's the servers being able to handle growth as they gain popularity.
Why microsoft won isn't internet explorer. It was as awful as Netscape until Andreeson drove that 700 dollar chair company off a cliff. And both were WAY worse than Mosaic until the government folded up shop, prefering to let the market continue. The ultimate result being Konq, Fire Fox, Opera, and the rest of the browser zoo. Microsoft "won" because of Trumpet TCP Winsock. That's what put windows on the itnernet, and made online gaming so fun. Without that? It's imposible to imagine windows in the digital world we have now.