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Opera CTO Thinks IE Will Be Forced To Support SVG
Julie188 writes "Opera Software is, as expected, preening over the forthcoming browser ballot box feature in Windows 7. It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it. But that's not the only reason Opera is gloating. CTO Håkon Wium Lie feels that today's decision will force Microsoft to make Internet Explorer do a better job of supporting standards, particularly the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Lie would also like to see Apple and Linux makers follow suit with browser ballot boxes of their own."
It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it
And the majority of users will simply ignore it and click on a name they've heard of. If Opera doesn't come up with some sort of educational advertising campaign, having this choice in Windows 7 won't make a damned bit of difference in the usage of their browser.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Forget individual standards and other pointlessness, Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox. They get a browser (largely for free) that's arguably better than there own efforts, even though they've been trying to do better. This nets them numerous benefits:
1) They can spend a lot less money developing their own competing product that's slowly hemorrhaging market-share regardless of what they do. There's not much money in the browser market anyway and they can make a few modifications to point the default search at Bing instead of Google.
2) They get all of the wonderful extensions that Firefox already has. In fact, they could have a few of the really nice ones enabled by default and claim that their browser offers more protection out of the box.
3) They can use it as an excuse to get the EU off of their back. It's not longer so much their browser as it is a rebranding of some other popular browser. Hell they could even include a version of Opera that defaults its searches to Bing.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters. If all browsers are standards compliant and have similar performance, does it really matter which browser a person actually uses? Microsoft hasn't been able to leverage any of its encoding formats through their browser. MP3 and AAC have completely outstripped WMA and I'm not aware of any major player utilizing WMV on the video side. That battle has been lost for Microsoft and to carry it on any further is futile and counter-productive.
6) They get to talk about how they're embracing open standards and open source so that they can appear like good guys when in reality the move would give them plenty of angles to play in the future and several ways to deride open source software.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see a reason for Microsoft not to make this transition. Formats are going to slowly slip through their fingers and they'll only end up loosing market share to superior browsers. If they would fork Firefox and toss their own interface on it so that it looks more like IE, then there's no real reason to use Firefox instead of IE. Neither is more or less secure and both would offer the exact same opportunities for customization and extension. Hell, a move like this could really hurt Mozilla which makes most of its money through their partnership with Google. Any exploits would also affect Firefox and someone is likely to have a decent patch available long before Microsoft would generally make one available. They would have to do a minimal amount of work and stay completely caught up with the Joneses.
Forcing a company to ship its competitors with its own product is ridiculous and anti-capitalism. Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use Internet Explorer. People are free to download Opera on their own, and if Opera's CTO wants more people to know about Opera, they should do what a business is supposed to do and get the word out about their product, not plead to the government for assistance. If that still doesn't get more people using Opera, then that's just life.
Some people have adopted this crazy idea that there is supposed to be balanced competition at all times, enforceable by the government. The point of competition is that someone is going to end up on top, and the others have to fight to compete. The government should only be stepping in when the competitor on top is illegally affecting the market in some way, but that's not the case here. You can download Opera the moment you start up your Windows PC for the first time.
Sorry, Opera, but your software isn't open source.
Wait... are you implying that an OS provider should have a choice as to which browsers are included in their distribution? It's a close call, but if I had to choose between MS and the government controlling things, I wouldn't choose the government.
Irrespective for any individual's hatred of MS, this decision reeks.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Mod parent up. it's Microsoft's monopoly and use of OEM licensing to force vendors to sell machines with windows on them which the EU should be addressing.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.