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EU Could Force Bundling Firefox With Windows
Barence writes "The European Commission could force Microsoft to bundle Firefox with future versions of Windows. The revelation came as part of Microsoft's quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the statements is a clause outlining the penalties being considered by the European watchdog, which recently ruled that Microsoft is harming competition by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs."
It would bring me great joy to see a video of you trying to arm wrestle an average high school football player.
Whale
What about MacOS X and Safari? Why isn't the EU going after Apple? And on that note, why am I FORCED to use Safari on my iPod Touch? Me thinks the EU needs to take a good long look at Apple if they are going to sanction Microsoft!
Then suddenly Opera could bitch about alphabetical order being unfair to them.
The whole solution stinks. Pick the top three by market share and put them on the desktop like internet services are. To have Opera claim MS "monopoly" excludes them is ludicrous, most people don't know of them and many who do would never have known of them except because of the lawsuit.
We can't succeed on our own, but if we leverage Microsoft's large install base by getting it declared illegal or harmful we can force our way onto millions of PC, whether or not people actually want our stuff. After it is good stuff because we say so! I know, lets go after iPhones next because its not fair that Apple has a monopoly there.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
See I don't think you WoW kids understand what a monopoly is.
Microsoft is not a monopoly, it has become the MAJOR player in the OS industry because their product was stable and good enough to be bundled with IBM computers down in the 80s.
So, there is no universal conspiracy to make you, and all the Linux users, a bunch of pathetic losers.
It is just capitalism and competency. The incompetent FOSS community is the one that needs to get their act together and fight to win market share.
Oh, but I forgot, Linux community is made of the same pathetic guys that used to get beaten and humiliated at school. The jocks and alpha males always will win, the rest, the rest will use Linux...
1 - Microsoft will have to agree to install Firefox by default in the EU to avoid even more fines.
2 - They will insist that IE is still installed too, as it's baked so deep into Windows that it'd require a hefty rewrite to remove, not to mention their spyware / update system demands Active X, which only they know how to implement.
3 - They will insist on installing it themselves, and install a modified version which will be buggy as hell, take up oodles of resources and crash like a plane which finds it's engines mysteriously vanish mid-flight.
4 - As part of the modified Firefox all crashes will point to microsoft.com "advice" about how IE is perfect and crash-free, and advise them to start using it.
5 - They'll also insist that IE is the default browser, even if a broken Firefox is there too.
6 - They'll disable all of the security features of their Firefox build, make some defaults unable to be changed, all to give people a bad impression of Firefox.
7 - They'll start the FUD campaign exposing the flaws (they added) against their magnificent IE.
8 - They'll insist that the Firefox pre-installed is the very same as everyone else's Firefox, so all the flaws are Mozilla's, not theirs.
9 - In a few years another lawsuit will reveal this collusion, and history will start to repeat again......as it always does with Microsoft.
To the M$ shills astroturfung at /.
Feel free to mark this as flamebait, many companies make mistakes and learn from them. Many companies have bad leadership and make big mistakes; in most cases the company starts to change after being punished and the CEO involved is removed. Microsoft are 100% unrepentant in everything they do, they see nothing wrong in what they do, the only thing they see as "wrong" is people standing up to them and holding them to account. They deserve NO benefit of the doubt.
Of course new versions of Windows will come with newer versions of IE anyways, and IE8 is approaching "reasonably standards compliant" to some degree, so the argument of standards is kind of specious.
Bullshit. They aren't even close to any other major browser let alone the cutting edge ones. Take a look at the my response to the last commenter to this to see specific dates and standards.
Firefox isn't standards compliant either, and it's getting to the point where choosing browsers means choosing between different non-standards compliance.
No browser is 100% standards compliant, but all the other ones are so much further along than IE that your equivocation is laughable. Beside that, they don't have to be standards complaint because the Web itself is not. It is broken because the one browser that most people use, which ships with Windows is so broken there is little point in using newer technologies. Who spends money making Web pages only 30% of users can use? By forcing IE to standards compliance or forcing it out of the position of being the only one bundled you restore competition so if IE doesn't work, users still have something that does. This motivates browser developers to move forward with new technologies and Web page developers to use them. That's the point.
Opera has never spent a lot of time trying to be compatible with IE anyways.
Yeah they've only wasted millions on it instead of hundreds of millions. You just admitted, I might mention, that one of their major problems is lack of compatibility with broken pages MS memos reveal they intentionally set out to make broken to prevent people from being able to compete. That's a crime.