Mozilla To Join EU Suit Against Microsoft

CWmike writes "The European Commission (EC) has granted Mozilla the right to join its antitrust case against Microsoft, a spokesman said Monday. If the charges stick, Microsoft could be forced to change the way it distributes IE, as well as pay a fine for monopoly abuse. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's chairperson, said in a blog over the weekend that there isn't 'the single smallest iota of doubt' that Microsoft's tying of IE to Windows 'harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.'"

Comments

An OS with no browser?

[JCSoRocks]

I love FireFox. It's all I use unless I'm confronted with some horrible IE-only site... but, are we really going to try and force Microsoft to stop including IE with the OS? If you have no web browser how are you supposed to go about getting one? Memorize an FTP address? Conveniently have one on a thumb drive or CD ready to go? Mozilla has already said they don't want to be included.

The answer to this is obviously less important to techies such as ourselves. I can, however, imagine the sad conversation I'd end up having with one of my less savvy peers.

'Firefox Exec Says Windows Bundling Is a Bad Idea'

[Mystra_x64]

Haven't they said just recently

'Opera's asserting something that's provably false. It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face. As people become aware there's an alternative, you don't end up in that [monopoly] situation. You have to be perceptibly better [than Internet Explorer].'

Re:ultimately reduces consumer choice

[moniker127]

Well, making IE uninstallable would be a start. It may also help if they changed their activex object to just use the default browser in browser embedded applications (mmo launchers & such).
No body expects them to advertise for mozilla, and they shouldnt have to, but they fight the consumer tooth and nail to make IE integrated into EVERYTHING, and thats what we're fighting.
If i remember correctly, if you manage to uninstall IE manually (not easy) in XP- simply putting the windows cd in your drive will auto reinstall it.

Every operating system has a befault browser

[javacowboy]

Windows has IE.
Macs have Safari.
KDE has Konqueror.

How can any operating system not include a default browser?

In the past, Microsoft tried to use its operating system monopoly to create a browser monopoly to destroy open standards on the web. It almost succeeded. This type of behaviour should be discouraged and remedies need to be found for it.

However, it seems silly to require that Windows either not ship with a browser or ship with several. It would be a slippery slope where Macs would need to include Firefox as well as Safari.

I'm not sure what the solution is. I would prefer that all OEM ships machines with Linux/OpenSolaris/FreeBSD, as well as just Windows. This would result in far less market share for Windows and IE, and open standards becoming more prevalent.

However, I would not want to take away Microsoft's ability to include a default browser, because the next logical step would be to take away Apple's ability to include Safari and KDE's ability to include Konqueror as their default browsers.

Re:ultimately reduces consumer choice

[RoFLKOPTr]

Who cares if IE is present on your computer? It doesn't pose a security risk if it's not running. And many widely-used programs use IE embedded in them (Steam, for instance), and I don't want to have to go download IE in order to be able to use it.

Re:Absolutely Rediculous

[mcgrew]

Ubuntu bundles Firefox

I haven't tried Ubantu, but I've tried several other distros including Red Hat, Suse, and Mandriva (my favorite so far). They all give you half a dozen choices of which browser to install when you install the OS.

But to answer your question, neither Ubantu nor Apple are monopolists who use their monopoly position to crush competetion. If Apple had 90% market share and abused that market share like MS does I imagine the EU would go after them as well.

Re:ultimately reduces consumer choice

[orclevegam]

The issue is that you can't uninstall IE. You can uninstall notepad and Windows will still boot and run just fine. Try deleting IE and the whole thing grinds to a halt. And before you say that IE gets used all over the place (like the help system), that can be fixed by just including the necessary DLLs while still allowing the browser itself to be uninstalled. Really IE shouldn't be embedded in everything the way it is, and I could think of about a dozen ways of fixing that particular problem, but that's a different situation entirely (which is only reinforced by the guarantee that there's nothing the user can do to remove IE so developers can count on it being available instead of bundling a rendering engine or providing the user the option of selecting one like they should do).