EC Considering Removing Internet Explorer From Windows

Itsabouttime writes "In a preliminary ruling, the European Commission told Microsoft that linking Internet Explorer to its dominant Windows operating system violates EC rules. The EC's ruling was triggered by a complaint from IE rival Opera. Microsoft could seek to offer a Windows version without IE, as it did in the EC's 2004 ruling on Windows Media Player."

Comments

Re:Removing IE poses one very significant problem

[seeker_1us]

How am I supposed to download Firefox then?!!? FTP? c'mon!

Go back to the US antitrust lawsuit.

The whole point was that the OEMs decide the middleware.

So you buy a Smell(TM) brand computer and they decide to put Opera on it instead of MSIE, you use Opera to get firefox.

Re:So what?

[seeker_1us]

No Windows cannot load whatever it wants to on their Operating Systems.

They are an operating system monopoly, and they can and DO leverage that to create unfair advantages in new markets.

Monopolies have to play by different rules. That is what gives the governments the right to tell them what they can and cannot load.

Re:Stupid..

[Teun]

The stupidity was in not telling MS to put a price on that media player, in other words the 'light' version should for obvious reasons have been cheaper.

The same applies for the proposed ruling about IE, it'll especially work when there's a price to pay for that eternally security challenged browser.

Re:What about the Firefox I get with Ubuntu?

[TimSSG]

Windows is considered to have monopoly power because below in quote. Tim S http://www.albion.com/microsoft/findings-6.html#pgfId-998632

34. Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.

Tim S

Re:Slow Justice is No Justice

[CommentThingSucks]

That is because IE is not just the browser frontend, it is an entire framework that a lot of third party applications depend on.

This was done intentionally by Microsoft, even going so far as making important components like Explorer depend on it. This isn't really the case any more for most of Windows, but the third party programs still need it, so removing it would break a lot of programs people use.

Firefox is not a replacement either, because it does not implement any of the interfaces that the IE framework does (even though they could go to MSDN and implement them, but we're talking about a lot of work here.)

Now... you could remove the actual IE program itself, as few other programs depend on it, but what would be the point? To save a few megabytes?

I mean, there is already the option to remove access to it and use another browser as default. That's really all OEMs would need to ship a third-party browser (it would be problematic for Microsoft to do so.)

Re:Slow Justice is No Justice

[Fluffeh]

And maybe they are just not that good, maybe their product is not much better compared to the other ones, or maybe their Marketing failed.. who knows?

Okay, please step AWAY from the Kool Aid slowly.

It's not about taking IE away from people at all. The real issue here is to make IE as compliant as the other browsers, thereby making a lot of other Microsoft products work on browsers OTHER than Microsoft. Here is an example:

Microsoft Sharepoint is a totally browser driven application that lets corporate people make business webpages, lists and office type content. Now, if it's totally browser driven, it should work in any browser right? Going a step further, the advertising on the product itself says "compliant with other browsers. Some loss of user experience may occur" - you know what that means? It means that if you use a browser other than IE to try to access this product, nothing works. Not even the navigation works. It's like buying Photoshop, touching up a .jpg file and then ONLY being able to open it again using Adobe Acrobat.

The point of this who case isn't to stop IE, it's to make use of the browser guidelines that are developed properly, so that if something "works through a browser" it can continue along quite happily no matter what the browser - as long as the browser is compliant. The problem is that folks like Firefox are playing by the rules - and suffering for it.

Re:Slow Justice is No Justice

[644bd346996]

As I recall, the command line ftp.exe is pretty much straight out of BSD. It is also a single executable that can be removed without breaking the operating system.