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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?
wget or cURL with a very good memory.
Personally, I think the latter option is more appealing, but only because we've been doing with with Linux for more than a decade.
Palm trees and 8
Not true if you are talking about front-end stuff like browsing web pages. Making things up?
If you are talking about back end stuff like Windows Update, that's not even done through a web page in Vista anyway. Maybe it uses some IE components in the background but I doubt the Firefox people want to make a module to update Windows anyway and updates to the OS is Microsoft's space anyway - a basic part of the OS. Not sure what else you could be referring to. Web based Help for Windows? Same idea.
People forget quickly. Yes, most OSs bundle a web browser but they don't hold a desktop monopoly. My guess is Opera wants to revisit that story in Europe.
[alk]
I think the opera browser for desktop is linked to the QT libraries, at least so on a Fedora distro. Not sure whether this is true for Windoze or mobile phones.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Apparently that has been fixed now? A change on the way Vista stores settings for default browser it seems.
[alk]
This is demonstrably false.
I have Vista and Opera, and Opera is set as default. If you click a link anywhere in Windows, it launches Opera. For example, if you get an error there is a link to an appropriate KB article on microsoft.com. Clicking this for me launches it in Opera.
The only programs I've found that don't honour the default are Yahoo Messenger and City of Heroes - apparently they prefer to hardcode to launch IE, which is their choice.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Well, I will tell you right now that this is not true. I have Firefox installed and set as my default browser right now. Any link I click on opens in Firefox, any time a program calls a default browser, Firefox opens.
There are a few rare cases when IE opens to display a website, but this is only when following a link from a really crappy program. I can only assume that this would be due to the programmer of said app hard coding the app to use IE (which is retarded, but has absolutly nothing to do with Vista). I can't even give an example of a program that acts like this, because it is so uncommon.
The important thing is ensuring that MS complies with open standards. Previous court cases involving IE and Media Player etc. seem to miss this point: The reason that MS creates their own software is to mandate their own formats (wmv, wma, .doc, tainted html etc.) so that they can ensure lock in. If you can enforce open formats, then this creates a level playing field for the software.
Such a result would unfairly penalize MS.
Great. So let the OEMs decide then. If it unfairly penalizes MS then tough. How many times has MS fucked over companies. It is time companies fucked them over to extract their revenge.
How am I going to download an Internet browser if my Operating System has no way of browsing the Internet?
yum install firefox
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Ever since Adobe sued Microsoft for bundling a PDF writer in with Office 2007, Microsoft has been pushing out a series of patches that breaks Flash Player content in IE.
Can you cite something?
Microsoft was sued by Eolas over a software plug-in patent they owned, and they altered (not broke) the way Flash content behaves in IE. (Basically, they made it so you have to focus the Flash by clicking on it before you could interact with the Flash.) But that was:
1) Not their idea, it was the result of a lawsuit, and
2) Long before Adobe sued Microsoft.
In any case, if your accusation is true, good for MS! Adobe's lawsuit about PDF is the most idiotic thing I've ever seen. You can't say PDF is an open standard and then sue a company that implements it, WTF.
Comment of the year
I thought Netscape was made by Marc Andreessen after he came over from NCSA. Sun doesn't seem to have had any part in Netscape's development.
IE provides an HTML Rendering COM Server to be embedded by any application on Windows. To remove IE (the part that does all the actual HTML Rendering) would break hundreds, if not thousands of applications. Internet Explorer also provides support for asynchronus pluggable protocols, which would break a whole slew of other applications if it was just ripped out.
Quite correct. Technically one can consider the entire UI of an OS to be "optional".
I will now point to the myriads of UI fiascos, efforts, flame wars, holy wars, and bottom up redesigns that have gone on in the (GUI) KDE/Gnome/XWin/X.Org projects or the (audio) ALSA/OSS/ESound/aRts/JACK projects.
I am not even going to list out all the various , especially since Wikipedia has them nicely summarized.
Sure all of the above projects had their reasons (most of those reasons well natured, and an few of them devious), but in some cases the sheer amount of rework that has gone on is just pointless. How many times does the wheel need to be reinvented?
Imagine if the various major projects had been coordinated and run efficiently. Maybe Linux would even have had sound working out of the box (out of the torrent?
Just restricting ourselves to browsers for a moment, if all the development effort that has been spent fighting had instead been used to make just one awesome browser, FF 3 would have been released last year, be fully complainant with HTML 5, have its CSS bugs long since worked out, support the entire SVG standard (right now all browsers with SVG support have only partial support). If some of those other projects mentioned above were unified then FF would also have had 100% working audio/video streaming in every format under the sun running on Linux to such an extent as to make Windows and Mac users jealous.
But just in terms of Gecko development, effort has been spent on Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Mozilla, and Firefox, and I'm sure I've forgotten a few as well!
Now think about how much of a hassle it has been to get all the various Linux browser configurations setup to work with all the various sound systems and media players. Streaming video working instead of a web page? Well that may depend on which of the 4 included browsers is being used!
Yes, choice is good. But when it is a matter of 5 choices, none of which do all that needs to be done, then the user is stuck choosing what they "least need to work" want rather than what they want to use, and that is not a good choice to force the user to make.
Any one given approach has its draw backs, a common complaint about FF is that abstracting away the UI (XUL et all) is resource intensive. As everyone who bothered to make a FF "native API spin off" eventually figured out, in 2 years no one really cares anymore and there is not much perf diff between native APIs and XUL.
This is sort of getting off track. Well not really. The final statement was:
Well of course it is technically POSSIBLE. But feasible? Not if you take into consideration the end user experience.
On a more grounded level, I'll note that Microsoft's HTML renderer is used all over the damn place in Windows XP and Vista. Looking at Vista's control panel, it sure as heck looks like nothing more than a fancy HTML page. One could easy argue that putting a thin wrapper on top of a basic OS level component then shoving in Favorites, History, and Cookies is such a minimal effort in comparison to writing an actual HTML renderer (just look above at the slew of Gecko front ends!) that the vast majority of the "web browser" code is fundamental to the end user functionality of the OS.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
FF/Opera/Safari arent required by the OS. IE is required by the desktop. You cant remove IE/MSHTML from Windows or Explorer (the desktop) stops working. Opera want MS to make the OS and its operation work without IE. If you think the OS works without IE, delete IE, MSHTML*.* and *url* from c:\windows\* and see how long it lasts.... Not long.