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?
Since no publicity is bad publicity, this is a cheap way for them to shout from the rooftops "We exist, we're a better browser than IE, IE sucks!! "
Oh, and their lawsuit has merit, as well.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I simply cannot believe this. Does anyone have a link to anything which gives reliable evidence that this is the case?
It's not forgetting, it simply not agreeing.
I don't see bundling software with your OS abuse of a monopoly if you OS has a monopoly. I do see bundling software that corrodes standards, as abuse however. You can add artificially high prices, artificially low-and-non-profitable prices to eliminate competition, forcibly preventing competing software for working on your platform, etc. as bad monopolistic practices also.
In this case, poorly followd standards, there are two fixes. An option should be given, rather than forcing a company to do one (or in this case both). Fixing the softwares compliance is certainly acceptable, but forcing them to stop providing their choice of a piece of software that provides a major portion of the functionality in any modern comptuer (the web browser), is not.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The easy solution rather then removing IE - why not just include two browsers on your operating system? I seriously think most users would like for the 'e' on their desktop regardless. I think a pretty interesting question would be: If MS was forced into removing their browser for some reason - what do you think they would bundle with their OS?
Mac OS X does come with Safari bundled, yes. However, Safari and Konqueror are in many ways the same browser; both are based on the open source WebKit, and it is possible for a user to compile a new copy of WebKit and replace Safari. (Witness the nightly builds at the Surfin' Safari blog, for instance.)
The issue I have usually heard from a web-design standpoint is that Internet Explorer is the only pre-installed option on Windows (meaning many people never bother to switch to another browser), is not remotely standards compliant (meaning web designers have to do all kinds of fun workarounds for IE compatibility) and is not open source, so (unlike the Linux and OS X situations) industrious end-users cannot simply go in and fix any HTML/CSS standards compliance bugs in the default-browser-flavor themselves.
That's how I read the Opera suit, though admittedly only one possible interpretation... "either make your browser play nice with the rest of the world, or offer other default browsers that do."
--Rachel
Actually, Safari is just a UI on top of Web Kit -- remove Safari and you still have a /System/Library/WebKit.framework. If you tried to remove Web Kit, you'd find that many applications don't work anymore, including Open Source applications like Colloquy and Adium. Other apps use Web Kit in nonobvious ways, too. I remember when I was first learning Cocoa, I was taught that a poor man's way of supporting printing was to create an offscreen Web Kit view with an HTML template, and just create a PDF of it when you wanted to print. I know of one popular Carbon app that uses HIWebView for embedding a Web Kit view, because one particular text-heavy view in the app is easier to manipulate using HTML and CSS, instead of custom Carbon HIObjects. As final example, I believe Apple's help system is entirely based on Web Kit.
Apple and Microsoft are obviously two different stories -- Microsoft has a monopoly influence on the market, and Apple does not, so Apple can get away with feats of bundling that Microsoft can only dream about. However, given the myriad ways third party developers, on both Windows and the Mac, rely on built-in HTML rendering engines, I'd be hesitant to remove those facilities from the standard libraries.
Standards compliance, though? I'm all over anyway to force the IE folks into that.
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product is made by screwing up open standards to closed, one-'browser'-only-usable ones, thus pushing other browsers out of the market by including this inferior product in a monopolised OS, I think I can see the unethical part of this.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story. It is not as if MS had a big marketshare and someone came up with altered standards to thwart them, but the standards were there before MS decided to alter them for their own purposes and made it impossible for others to use their (MS's) 'standards'.
Disclaimer: I am not a web-developer, and don't even play one on tv.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Firefox has a market share of about 16% globally, compared to about 77% for IE. IE is clearly the de facto standard, not Firefox. It doesn't matter what's "propping it up", as you say, the point is it's still "up": it's the browser most people use, and hence the one that web pages have to work with.
If some web developers like Firefox, and write for it, that's all well and good, but that doesn't make it the de facto standard, even if you'd like to imagine otherwise. If it continues to gain market share, Firefox may eventually replace IE as the de facto standard, just as IE replaced Netscape Navigator, which had earlier replaced Mosaic, but Firefox isn't close now -- not even remotely close.
As an aside, I have recently encountered websites that don't work with Firefox. One of the more annoying examples is the student website run by my university, which is used to distribute all information to students. It doesn't use ActiveX, but Firefox doesn't work with it and neither does Opera. When you complain the the IT department, their simple reply is, "use IE". They feel free to ignore Firefox and Opera because IE is the de fact standard, you see. Another site that doesn't work in Firefox or Opera is my bank's web site, because it uses an ActiveX control. Again, they feel free to leave it this way because IE is the de facto standard.