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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.
EU seems to show signs of hard of hearing or is Zonk having hard of seeing?
...Fire burns and water is wet.
My humor is probably your flamebait
Microsoft is the one company that comes up with new standards, most of them poor. However, they are also the ones who are the worst at following well established standards, as well as adapting to new commonly accepted ones. For example, when do you think IE will support SVG without any 3rd party plugins?
Pure awesomenes
I think it would be great if IE at least tried to follow web standards, but forcing them to adopt them is hard to enforce, as no current browser (that I'm aware of) follows the standards 100%.
But in IE's case, it seems almost to be a complete disregard for the standards.
would make it kind of irritating to get any browser. You can't really tell them they have to provide a browser written by a competitor, so how would people go to websites to download the browser they want?
s/Opera/Internet Explorer/ and I'll agree with you.
Opera's chief mission is mobile platforms. There's nothing even in the ballpark on Symbian or Windows Mobile.
That's okay, I've installed Opera on two additional computers and a mobile device to make up for it. I'm also going to give my brother in law some Wii points so he can get Opera for his console.
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.
If there is a finer mobile browser on the market I have yet to experience it. Additionally, can you name another browser with supported releases that run on any web enabled device from game consoles to personal computers?
Wrong. MSIE has always been a driving force behind and an early adopter of web standards - they just don't seem to be able to finish, and never go back and fix their old stuff. IE isn't a money-maker for MS, so they dont' throw money at it. IMHO, they should open the code and let the community have at it, with them for oversight. MSIE is a very visible part of Windows, and leveraging the community like that to polish their image would be a brilliant move.
Learn about Photography Basics.
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.
Really, it all starts with getting rid of the damned thing in the first place--End 6!
What everybody seems to misunderstand is that as a world wide monopoly, Microsoft is supposed to act in a responsible way so as not to inhibit the growth of competition. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Microsoft does at every turn.
By denying access to it's communication protocols, Microsoft inhibits competition for network services.
By creating media formats that are secret and proprietary it inhibits competition for media creation and playback.
By creating a browser that is non-standard it skews the entire browser market and online experience.
By creating document formats that are proprietary with unpublished protocols Microsoft effectively locks customers into a continuous cycle of purchases once again locking out competition.
That is why Microsoft was found guilty of being an aggressive predatory monopoly. The only reason Microsoft didn't have to face any consequences is because the Bush administration was flush with Microsoft dollars when they came to power.
Microsoft must be held to a higher standard of conduct because of it's monopoly market condition. Unfortunately, Microsoft uses it's vast wealth and power to stifle competition at every turn. Whether it's a children's learning tool in Nigeria or gaming a world standard or a groundswell of support for Linux in China, Microsoft attempts to suppress competition with bribes and corruption.
I sincerely hope the EU takes their head off because we sure can't rely on the Americans to do the right thing.
Ed
I think it's more a case of Opera being pissed that it's not funded with Google money like Mozilla Firefox is.
Wait, so Opera is pissed at Google and Firefox, so their solution is to sue Microsoft? Oh, yeah, and who said Opera doesn't take money from Google?
If "developers" are going to "fight", how about developing something the market cares about instead, eh?
Maybe they'll appeal to the market once the market is actually choosing the best browser instead of having IE forced on it?
Last time I checked, it's pretty easy for people with any kind of preference to install windows, use IE once to download Firefox/Opera/Lynx/etc. and delete all shortcuts to IE, never to be seen again (except maybe for Windows Update). Are we really saying that IE's significant majority in the browser market is wholly due to people's apathy/stupidity?
This will probably result in a number of death threats, but, I've tried Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape and I still choose to use IE7. Yeah, the others might be a little faster rendering pages, but I make extensive use of tabbed browsing and rarely wait for a pages to render. Firefox is a memory sieve. The others don't support Windows Authentication (yes, I know, evil M$ proprietery, etc.) but that's a requirement at work, so switching to another browser (or running 2 browsers in parallel) on principle when I'm perfectly happy with IE just doesn't appeal to me.
.. some odds, but much beauty
;)
I run Opera 9.24 (int) and Firefox 2.0.0.1 (de)
Opera_int (6.3 MB)
Firefox_de (5.7 MB)
1.) ODD
- Opera is very slow handling
ebay.de/.com
reichelt.de (radioshackalike)
pages, for these pages I use Firefox.
- not OpenSource
2.) Beauty
- win32/bsd/linux
- Email Client (IMAP/POP3)
- Addressbook
- lightweight
- can close all tabs (beautifull and slick)
- restores sessions faster than firefox
- Wand (Password manager) == awesome
- speeddial
- Bookmarkmanager, it's a mighty tool in contrast to FF
- abook/bookmark/mail export/import function == very good
- Widgets (addons)
- uses Mozilla Pluggins
These features are built in, and must not be installed manually,
like you would do with Plugginfox.
Well and as you can think this post was written within Opera/win2k
here comes my advise
Just try it out, and judge.
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.
Not necessarily. End users don't pick their browsers for standards compliance. They do pick them by questions like, "Does this browser work with my bank's website?"
If the most-used browser (IE or otherwise) is fully standards-compliant, that lowers the bar for developers to build sites that work with multiple browsers: target standards and you get something that works in IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc., instead of targeting IE6, tweaking for IE7, tweaking for Firefox, and deciding anyone running another browser is just SOL.
End result: More websites are compatible across the board, so when people try Opera, fewer of them will run it for 2 days and say, "Well, I sorta like it, but the POS browser can't handle my favorite website. I'm going back to IE."
... she has been putting on weight and all ...
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
Undercut the only real competition and drive them out of business by offering a free web browser then "extend and embrace" to make it incompatible with existing standards, brilliant!
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I've been a web designer for 8 years now. The last few years i've been building to css and standards. All I can say is:- I would enjoy my job much much more, if 50% of my time wasn't fixing IE bugs and having to include seperate styles for every version of IE. I hate Microsoft for doing this to me. They had a chance to make it better with IE7, but they just fucked it up...again!!! And to all you I.T folks out there. Get IE7 on all your machines, I'm fed up coding for the 30% of users in their offices still on IE6!!! Pleeaaasseee!!!!
I keep an installation file of Internet Explorer 3.0 available on a floppy disk for emergencies.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
I am against adding hacks to my web site to make my site work with IE6 or 7 or any browser for that matter. I strongly feel that if you follow well established web standards your site will work on any browser.
Well once you're in the real world and your job depends on the site you're building working in IE you'll change your tune.. or find other employment. If it doesn't look right in IE, you can't ignore it, like it or not.
- People who browse the Web from the break room at work, from a public library, or from any other computer that they can use but not install programs on.
- People who try to download Firefox Setup 2.0.0.11.exe, but they are too inexperienced with Windows to save to the desktop or to correlate the location in a Save As dialog boxes with the location in Windows Explorer.
- People who prefer not to install software that they didn't hear about in a TV ad, thinking that little-known software is more likely to be malware.
- People who manage to install Firefox, but because the icons look different from those of Internet Explorer, they cannot find their way around.
Do you know of any special techniques that a web site maintainer can use to handle these cases? but I have to keep a copy of IE around because my bank's website only works with IE. I don't know whether there's a Chase branch near you, but Chase.com works fine for me in Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 1. Which bank do you use, so that other Slashdot users can consider transferring their balances away from this bank?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
In reality, people can just code for IE and ignore the other browsers and hit most of the web.
Sure they can. Except coding for IE alone is still a bitch, and ignoring other browsers is incredibly naive as IE no longer holds 95%+ dominance as it once did. In reality, these people are stupid as far as creating web content goes.
The only instance where this is an acceptable practice in business terms is when the client specifically says, "compatibility with anything other than IE is not necessary" - either because it's for an internally-geared site where the end users are definitely only using a particular version of IE, or because they don't want want to pay for the time sunk into cross-browser QA. It still winds up costing quite a bit of money in the end, though, because as mentioned before, there *is no standard* for how markup behaves in IE, let alone between different versions of IE. Developing for IE is a case of remembering what sort of breakage there is between versions and attempting to account for each mangled take on how HTML and CSS is supposed to be written.
Furthermore, even if you want to discount other browsers to the point where you pooh-pooh the significant adoption of Firefox and the popularity of Safari on the Mac, you're totally screwed when you try to implement the design the client's in-house or third-party designer created on their Mac and they call you up to say how broken it is in Safari. Then you'll wind up engaging in the same compatibility gymnastics you would've engaged in for IE, except you'll be having to transfer the IE-compatible markup and styling to a separate stylesheet because you'll now find yourself having to write to standards to make it work. Suddenly, you'll realize you wasted an insane amount of time not writing to standards and then fixing things for IE.
It's not really Microsoft's problem - it's everyone else's. Trying to get Microsoft to see it as something they need to fix is futile. They don't need to do a thing. They have no interest in making the web interoperable. Why would they?
To compete and attempt to remain relevant! They've already lost more browser market share in the past few years than anyone had anticipated being possible. The one and only advantage that IE has at this point is being the default browser on Windows. That's it. When even laypeople are using other browsers, that's a pretty tenuous advantage.
Funnily enough, I do agree with Opera on this one, though I don't use Opera.
It may be faster and nicer in many ways, but some Firefox extensions are simply way too valuable to me.
Ignore this signature. By order.
You missed some of the point. Actually, you missed most of the meat of the point. The 77% market share and lack of separation is only as big issue an issue because Microsoft refuses to implement proper web standard compliance in their browsers, and that forces programmers (who want their site to be seen properly by IE users) to program non-spec compliant code in conjunction with the spec-proper code for the _real_ browsers on the internet.
If IE supported all current standards properly, users who switched away from it to other browsers would not see so much of a difference in web content, because they would be looking at a page which should render correctly in _all_ browsers, not just one. Does anyone but me remember what Microsoft's website looked like in Firefox 1.0 before they re-did it to make it compatible?
I rest my case.
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
You're just pissed that few people care which browser they use.
No, I'm pissed that because of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, web developers have to spend 5x more time and effort than they should because they can't code to the W3C standards for HTML and CSS. I'm pissed that because of this, many lazy web developers have chosen to only support the one major browser that doesn't conform to standards, which means I can't necessarily use the browser I want.
I'm pissed because Microsoft is purposefully trying to make sure I can't use the browser I want to use. For years, using a browser that conformed to standards meant that pages rendered incorrectly or didn't function at all. This was largely due to Microsoft, and it was on purpose. Sometimes this was the case on major sites, which meant that people could not use any browser other than IE and expect to be able to use the internet. Even still, Microsoft won't build its own sites according to standards. If you visit their knowledge base in any browser other than IE, it will cut off articles prematurely. If you visit an OWA site in anything other than IE, you don't get the real version of their web app. Microsoft was even caught putting extra code into MSN.com just so that it wouldn't render in Opera.
Face it, Microsoft has been systematic about subverting web standards in the hopes of forcing people to use their OS, their browser, and their websites. They do it in order to restrict the freedom of the market to choose anything other than their products. Because they have a monopoly and are able to overpower market forces, government intervention is probably required.
It's depressing that this paranoid fantasy won you positive mod points.
On and off over the years I've had occasion to work with Microsoft developers on various things. At one point I worked with the COM team and the IE team for several months. I didn't work for MS, I worked for a company that had discovered a weird and complicated bug. "They" are just a bunch of guys, regular programmers, just like you find at every other big company in the world. Nobody has a secret evil plan. It just doesn't exist. They bust their ass meeting deadlines and building things and dealing with bug reports and testing and builds and everything else, and frankly there are so many different people involved, any such Evil Agenda would be exposed so quickly from the inside it would make your head spin.
It's exactly the same as people who talk about "the government" engaging in these elaborate machinations: both organizations are too large, and spread across too many people, and moving in too many different directions simultaneously to permit the kind of organization and single-mindedness of purpose that is required to execute these clever, evil plots. There are too many points of exposure. Too many potentially disgruntled employees in the loop.
Sure, occasionally somebody really does take it upon themselves to do something underhanded, but as an organization-wide "strategy" it just doesn't happen that way.
But this is slashdot, and reason takes a back seat to self-righteous anti-capitalism.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Because it is illegal to tie a product you have monopolized to one in a different market.
...what about MacOS X and Linux?It is illegal for them to tie products in markets they have monopolized with one in a different market. That is why the EU is investigating Apple's market share with the iPod (since they are close to having monopoly influence in that market) and may force them to remove the ties between the iPod and the ItTunes store and iTunes software.
why should Microsoft sell an OS without a web browserBecause it has destroyed both the market for Web browsers and slowed progress of Web technologies to a crawl. Standards that were finalized over a decade ago and implemented by every other browser are still not viable technologies because of MS's refusal to implement them and the importance of that due to their monopoly in desktop OS's. Why do you object to IE having to compete on even ground with other browsers? All MS has to do is ship all the other browsers with Windows as well as IE or stop shipping IE with it or agree to abide by the standards so the Web can move forward. What, exactly is your objection to that?
why punish a company out to extinction?Are you implying that if MS has to compete fairly in the browser market they will become extinct?
Is just because it isn't European?The EU has enforced their antitrust laws against dozens of European companies in the past 5 years. For that matter, the US courts ordered even more drastic measures then this when they convicted MS of abusing US antitrust law, but then there was an election where MS was one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and suddenly the new people running the DoJ decided MS's punishment should be changed from being broken up, to the absolutely nothing at all would be done.
but what business do they have with the OS?Windows is a monopoly. When you have a monopoly, you can tie it to other markets to undermine capitalist free trade in those markets. Thus, when you have a monopoly, you can't tie that monopoly to other markets, because it breaks capitalism. For years IE has been inferior to other browsers in almost every way, and yet it still has the lion's share of the market. That is a market failure. The only thing wrong with Firefox is it can't handle Web pages intentionally broken to work with IE, or using MS proprietary technologies that only work with IE. Both of those problems exist only because of MS's monopoly abuse, thus they are artificial problems introduced into a competing product, through the use of a monopoly in another market. That is criminal, in both the US and the EU. Even american companies like Sun, however, have been forced to go to the European courts because the US ones are so corrupt and bribable. Before you go slandering the EU courts as anti-american, maybe you should research how the US courts have been behaving.
First the rallies for Obama, now complaints about IE. When will she stop being so political?
and yet a small private company consisting of tens of individuals (opera) can make a standards compliant browser while microsoft (60000 employees and 20 billion profit every year) cannot.
so i must conclude that either microsoft is incompetent or microsoft is deliberately not implementing the standards.
I agree with the view that IE should be removed from windows... but this doesn't hurt Microsoft enough.
Basically a lot of people are not able to change platforms due to one piece of software which has been in windows since windows 98... Nearly all games currently available need directx to run, which is deeply embedded in windows. If microsoft is forced to distribute directx separately from windows and charge for it per installation (per seat), I think a lot of game developers will choose a different api, thereby allowing games to be ported easier to other platforms.
Another thing: Microsoft should be stopped from tampering with the hardware market. As it stands most "cheap" motherboards and laptops have trouble running anything other then windows due to a severely foobar'ed acpi (for which we can thank the severely broken microsoft acpi compiler).