Opera Tells EU That Microsoft's IE Hurts the Web

kastababy writes "In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Update: 12/14 19:47 GMT by Z : We also discussed this yesterday.

Comments

Opera

[Punk CPA]

Up and coming since 1994? How far and how slowly do they have to climb? No offense, but Opera's chief mission in life seems to be making it slightly more complicated to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for cross-browser performance.

Re:Waaambulance

[Hal_Porter]

I like Opera (using it now) but this standards thing is ridiculous.

E.g. now people complain that IE doesn't support SVG. There's a reason for that - in 1998 Microsoft, Visio and Autodesk proposed VML as a standard, already implemented in IE 5.0. Everyone else hates Microsoft so they decided to standardise on an SVG instead which is as different from VML as possible. It took them about 4 years, until 2001 so there was no chance of it being in IE 6.0 (released in 2001). It's not exactly widely used on the web as far as I can tell. MS decided not to bother supporting it in IE 7.

If users want SVG, they can download a free plugin. Actually websites using SVG could make a web page that autodownloads a signed ActiveX control like flash does. Flash isn't natively supported by IE either, and yet virtually all sites use it. Or like Google maps they could use VML instead to render vector content on IE. I don't see what the complaint is really.