Slashdot Mirror
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.
Didn't we see this yesterday here???
This is just sad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Are you using an insanely old version of Opera, or are you of the delusional "IE dictates the standards, screw everything else" crowd? I ask because I can't see any other reasons why you'd suggest that it makes cross-browser testing painful. The last few versions of Opera have been wonderful in terms of adhering to W3C standards. I'm not an Opera fan by a longshot -I find the name annoying, I have a fairly severe loathing for people who tout it as the second coming, and it doesn't have Firebug- but testing in it is part of my QA cycle, and generally speaking, if markup validates, things tend to render as expected in Opera.
You are aware that Microsoft is a member of the W3C, right? And that they contributed to the development of such standards as CSS2? And that Microsoft pledged to support these standards back in 1998, and yet somehow their competitors support considerably more parts of that spec than they do? (I suspect ceasing all development other than security fixes for 3-4 years had quite a bit to do with that.)
A bunch of companies didn't get together and say, "We don't like how Microsoft does the web, let's design another one." A bunch of companies including Microsoft got together and said, "Here's how we're going to design the web," Microsoft signed off on it, and then went off in their own direction.
No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.
Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."
Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.
They won't. The whole point of IE was to build a browser that would be incompatible with standards and tied to Microsoft's OS. They didn't go through all that trouble to kill Netscape just because they thought it'd be fun. They did it to stall the growth of the Web. Microsoft was seriously worried that Netscape's vision of thin-client linux-like boxes running just a web browser becoming the new standard for computers. But more importantly they were worried that they would get 95% of the marketshare in this new world.
Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep IE closed source so that they can continue to use it strategically to throw a wrench into the standards. As long as stuff doesn't quite work right on IE and IE is the majority browser Microsoft can continue to stall and delay anything that challenges their dominance.
Fanatically anti-fanatical