Slashdot Mirror
Why Microsoft's EU Ballot Screen Doesn't Measure Up
An anonymous reader writes "A lengthy interview on Groklaw discusses the EU's case against Microsoft. The case is supported by Opera, Google, Mozilla, ECIS, and the Free Software Foundation Europe. The EU has demanded that users be offered a 'ballot screen' to make it easier for users to select other browsers. Microsoft has responded by implementing the ballot screen as a web page inside IE. While this may nominally satisfy EU's demand, it is unlikely to satisfy users who prefer other browsers. In order to select another browser, users must be running IE. Also, users will be shown security warnings when choosing from the ballot. Microsoft's ability to charge patent fees in Europe is also discussed: why are they allowed to charge patent fees where software patents are not recognized?"
You can remove it, you just have to create a custom install disc, which is far more work than one should need to put in. Why MS can't conceive that people don't want a lot of that crap is beyond me.
Why MS can't conceive that people don't want a lot of that crap is beyond me.
I dont think "normal people" care that much though. They dont see the difference between IE being still installed but hidden and IE being completely removed from the system. They get to choose another browser tho.
Microsoft has responded by implementing the ballot screen as a web page inside IE.
I wonder how they've could had done it differently. If you provided the install exes along with OS setup, they would be outdated (bad bad thing in browsers). They could had made another protocol that tells the setup what browsers to show for the user and setup then downloads it, but whats the point. When it's an actual webpage, there's much more control in updating it, and it would had been pretty useless for MS to develop completely new rendering engine and browser just for that (and MS browser would still had been there). The security warnings are stupid however.
Even better: Windows 7 doesn't come with a mail client.
Go somewhere random
We would all be annoyed of course, but isn't that the ultimate goal of the "fairness" crowd?
Historically, most attempts by government (any government) to promote "fairness" almost always result in increased inequity.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So, the IE installed on the system is not out of date? It is the same tihng. You can include the EXEs and have browser search for its updates on the first startup, without actually going to an unsecure website. Or just provide an EXE that goes onto the web and downloads the most recent version. But, I don't think it is that big of a deal except for the security warnings.
You're right. And when the U.S. DOJ fined the record companies for telling Walmart, Kmart, Target, and other stores, "You must sell these CDs are $12 or more, or else be cutoff from future supplies," the DOJ was wrong there too. Companies should be free to treat their customers and stores like ____, and do whatever is necessary to "win" and kill off the competition via monopolistic practices. Yes technically the record companies violated anti-cartel and price-fixing laws, but who what?
Heck the government shouldn't even be regulating monopolies like Baltimore Gas & Electric, or Bell Telephone. Let them charge the customers whatever they want. Yes they hold a monopoly but so what? It's their market and their right to do whatever they want.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
P.S.
IE is an open door that lets viruses through. I was having a problem with viruses, and when I uninstalled IE, they disappeared. What a piece of crap program.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Windows 7 no longer includes Windows Mail (the program that replaced Outlook Express in Vista).
If you want a mail client, you have to download Windows Live Mail or your choice of client.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not like IE is being removed from Windows anyway. There's other things that use it no matter what your default browser is.
This is just whining for the sake of whining.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You really need to think your troll/ridiculously stupid posts through. It would be trivial to have an MSXML/text/MSSQL file contain a list of browsers,icons,download locations and then have an app show that list (in a nice GUI with icons and all), complete with misleading warnings.
or to put it another way "I'd create a GUI interface using visual basic to see if I can install the browser people want"
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I don't think any FTP program producers will complain about hidden command line ftp commands being used. You do know about command line programs do you ? I don't see anybody complaining that the windows embedded FTP client interferes with GUI based FTP programs. Not to mention that FTP standards are more rigorously adhered to, or it wouldn't work. MS doesn't break http it breaks html. There is no equivalent in FTP.
Because that requires an internet connection. I know internet access is common, but can we really assume these days that *everybody* has it, and that it is correctly configured and connected right out of the box? Most home routers are administered via a web page, requiring a browser. Imagine if the ftp session fails to connect. Now what?
... "connection closed by remote host"
Customer talking to ISP tech support: I get an error when I select Opera as my browser
ISP tech: Hmmm. What is the error?
Customer: Something about "connection closed by remote host"
ISP tech: How about if you select a different browser?
Customer: I don't want to select a different one. I want Opera
ISP tech: Well, we can change it back later. Please select Firefox
Customer: OK
ISP tech: OK, well now we are stuck. You have no browser (thanks EU) so you can't connect to your router to check its settings. We'll have to send a technician to your home. There will be a $100 service charge. Is two weeks from next Wednesday between the hours of 8AM and 5PM convenient for you?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
What part of Windows being a monopoly don't you get?
Dilbert RSS feed
and to get the damn Live-Mail, you almost have to use IE and jump through a lot of hoops just to get it. Went through that the other day and it was a real PITA as the Live Downloaded wanted to install a whole rash of other crap, just like all the other freebies out there. Of course instead of adding the Ask Toolbar, it wanted to add in Messenger, the damn Blogger accelerator for IE and sign you up for both a Live Id and a damn hotmail account.
Damn MS for making it even harder on people to simply get a copy of Outlook Express and don't even get me started on the Student and Teacher Edition of Office from which they've dropped Outlook in favor of One Note. They could at least include a copy of OE/Live Mail on the disk with the rest of Office so people who are using Win7 get a working mail client.
I've got a friend who's told me in no uncertain terms that she's getting a new lappy with Win7 on it. Current one is a 7+ yr old Dell running XP so she's making a big jump. Thankfully, I've already grabbed Live-Mail so it's not neccessary to go through all the agravation to get it once again if her new system isn't preloaded with it.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I manage a lot of Windows computers at work and the last thing I want is an automatic update suddenly presenting my users with the invitation to choose a new browser
This only happens on new installs I do think your point about corporate enviroments is valid, however i think that is something MS worry about and unless you leave users with default windows installs i don't think having 1 extra command/config option/program to set it will be an excessive workload.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Yeah. In windows 8 you have to send in an email to microsoft, and they'll send back a list of possible clients.
a very limited number of known products, specific browsers which have been concluded by the European Commission should be included on the ballot screen.
Does anyone else find it really, really, strange that the allegedly libertarian geek would accept without protest - even demand - that the state bureaucracy give its stamp of approval before a browser can appear on the ballot?
Can't he see what a precedent this sets?
Surfing the political wave is treacherous - with dramatic shifts from left to right. FOSS and anti-trust can wipe-out.
You, uh, are aware that there are better alternatives to the shitheap that is outlook express, right? Thunderbird, just to pick the popular one, doesn't have any hoops at all. Why would you jump through the MS hoops for a piece of low-grade quasi-free software?
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
I always use IE to download Opera. So it doesn't really matter if it is outdated. To me the ballot screen is a silly requirement - most people don't know enough to vote, and there is the risk of malware ridden browsers getting onto it. People who do know enough to vote can already download an alternative browser and use that instead.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Next motherfucker that uses the term 'lappy' gets punched in their internet face.
Do you have any examples at all to back this absurd statement up?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
http://www.pmail.com/index2.htm
Clean, simple, free - I found it years ago, and the wife learned to use it in just a couple days. And, she's no computer whiz. It runs beautifully on WinXP, and my search for Win7 on the forum suggests that it runs just fine on Win7.
I searched this out specifically because OE was being targeted by worms, and it was installed on all of my machines until I decided to move to Google mail.
They are seeing financial hard times (who isn't?) so a little donation would be even more appreciated than ever, but it is still free as I write this.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Grub?
I still run into people, latest time was at work, that still think Internet explorer /is/ the Internet.
I intend to buy Windows and I want it to come with IE. What is your problem. If you don't want to see it go in control panel > programs and disable it. What is more MS suggested to remove IE completely from the system but the regulators did not allow them. So obviously MS can conceive that people don't want "that crap" (except that people who actually want it) but they are not allowed to remove it. Now who is to blame?
then it's oh-so-richly deserved.
I've seen more clueless crap emanate from the eu than any hick state in the US.
I'd like a ballot screen for choosing the operating system.
I saw one like that from HP's business line. Two problems:
1) Both were from MS (XP or Vista)
2) The notebook was summarily handed to an idiot with a major case of "Oooh, clicky!" syndrome who not only loaded Vista against his company's wishes, but then tried to get XP back by deleting everything he could find. Including Windows and the recovery files.
Somehow, this all wound up being my fault.
The problem with an OS chooser is that it's only useful to people who know what an OS is. A lot don't, and the ones that do and have a nonstandard preference should be at a point where they can install it themselves.
Please see this post for clarification. In short: if we wake up tomorrow and ChromeOS is already the dominant operating system, would it be required of it to support installation of third party browsers, even if such a feature was never intended?
Th only relevant answer to that is to use the IE awareness initiative, so that users can see another ballot screen every time they go to a website ;-)
All jokes aside, IE8 is not that bad of a browser when you compare it to IE6 that is. Sure, it lacks most modern HTML5 & CSS3 stuff that makes life so simple with the competition...
When I'm working on someone's computer and they are having problems with IE that I know Firefox would solve, I usually first just ask them if they've heard of Firefox. About half the time they have, usually having used it on a friend's computer. Then I ask them what sites they usually visit. My mom's an avid Craigslist fan so I installed Firefox and added Greasemonkey with the Craigslist image script. The script automatically pulls the images from the ads and inserts them on the main page under each heading. Needless to say I made an instant believer out of my mother and she uses Firefox to this day.
No amount of whining or explaining is going to make most people switch browsers. Just show the strengths (adblock being a good standby) of the alternatives and they sell themselves.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Then use something else!! Jesus Christ.
Look, if you don't like the product, don't use the product! Shocking, I know, but there it is.
No matter if you use it or not, please don't come here and whine here about it. If you want Microsoft to make the install process easier, send feedback to Microsoft. Again: shocking, I know.
Comment of the year
The most hilarious part of that install.
"Do you want to make Bing your main search engine and make it so this is impossible for other search engines to change?"
Wtf?? Its like hey, want us to rootkit you?
Bring them to websites using the IE awareness initiative! People need to know!
Honestly, It sounds to me like everyone is over-engineering this to to death.
I'm yet to be convinced that a modern desktop-oriented operating system should be crippled by being forbidden from preinstalling a browser. At the very least, it makes zero sense to not provide an html renderer with the OS. It has become one of the most basic functionalities you can ask for.
This said, and accepting you have a browser pre-installed, it takes about half an hour to come up with a mock-up of a page with a decent presentation and a listing of all the browsers they could ask for. The bit of code that's dedicated to this functionality is also a lot less error-prone than an application written from scratch. Given a solution that takes less dedicated code, is quicker to implement, and is less buggy, how is picking that solution "over-engineering" exactly?
That's in response to those asshat toolbars like "WebSearch" which fool less than computer literate people into installing them. They switch all your search preferences to their own spyware option automagically.
The Bing option you mention would require you to manually change it, so it can't get hijacked.
In other words, it's not a bad thing.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
First off, you don't need IE to get Windows Live (from whence you get Live Mail). Windows comes with a handy dandy little app that will go get it for you instead. It uses the same api's IE uses, but who the hell cares? Those are windows networking api's for the most part.
If for some reason you can't get it through the app (AV security restrictions, for one) then you can go to the windows live website - which is just a website that can be accessed from any browser.
Wow, look at all that lock-in required to get Live - oh wait, there isn't any.
As for the cruft, I hate that too. The only thing I like is the Windows Live client (best client I've ever used, though I can't say I've used them all), for the rest of the stuff I perform the incredible difficult task of... unchecking the boxes. Holy cow, that's difficult, I almost didn't manage!
Seriously man, quite whining. It looks bad. If you are really installing Live Messenger that often that downloading it is a nuisance, you can easilly get the full download off the Live website and put it on a thumb drive and keep it with you.
Outlook Express is a security nightmare, which is why Microsoft phased it out. Either use Microsoft's other free client (Live Mail), or use a different free client, or pay for a client. Seriously man, someone gives you something for free and all you can do is complain about it.
Jeeze.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's an excellent example of the schism between what ordinary people think of as a computer and how Microsoft sees it.
Ever noticed how OEMs are not allowed to change things like the Windows start-up sound? As far as Microsoft are concerned, their product is XP and your computer has it. As far as the consumer is concerned it's a Sony/HP/Dell/etc computer and it does what computers do. I reckon at least 50% of people don't even know what Windows is, or that Internet Explorer is a web browser and there are alternatives. All they see is a computer and an icon called Internet Explorer which is "the internet".
The problem for OEMs is that it's hard for them to sell a computer with Linux because people can't install The Sims 3 on it. ASUS did the world a massive favour with their Linux netbooks which demonstrated that as long as you don't have a slot to put Sims 3 discs in and your product otherwise looks similar to and does all the things that Windows does you need not pay the Microsoft tax. Google and Facebook are really helping too because now they are the "killer apps" most ordinary people want, all without an optical drive.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do people just make things up so they're complaints sound solid? I must be new here.
You must be, that's a hallmark of Slashdot argument. I'll show you how to make yourself sound like an expert on a subject in less than 5 minutes:
First, read the post you disagree with and look for any "fact" (facts are flexible here) that looks less than solid.
Fire up Google and search for a negation of that fact (such and such is not yadda yadda). Even if this yields nothing, you should now know enough about the jargon to start making shit up.
All you really need to do is make sure it is relatively logical, and then state it with absolute certainty. Don't use sissy terms like may, or might, or "scientists think", or any other such pansy talk. State it as if you did the hard research yourself and everyone else in the whole world is a moron.
A great way to fend off rebuttals for something you know is not well documented is to force a conditions for any potential rebuttal. Something along the lines of "Show me where X happened" when you know damn well nobody has been able to gather proof of such a thing. This lends credibility to your own position, regardless of whether or not there is any actual proof for your side either. The fact that your bullshit first and any rebuttals now must prove their side right means you win.
Statistics are fantastic, everybody knows they are unreliable when taken out of context, yet they will still believe an obvious bullshit statistic over just stating an opinion. For example, some statistics on the Healthcare debate (these aren't exact, as I don't feel like looking them up, but they are ballpark): 60% of Americans want a public option, but 65% of Americans don't trust the government to manage healthcare. WTF? It doesn't make much sense, but it is true (roughly). Without any context, you can make those two statistics fit just about any argument you want for any side of the issue. And of course, since you don't know what they actually mean yourself, it's all bullshit anyway.
Don't bother attacking the poster, people just scream "Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem!" and your BS gets overlooked. You need to be more subtle. One of the most effective forms of argument is to re-state the oposing position and adress all of their concerns. The same is true for BS arguments - the better your straw man (incorrectly restating the oposing position and then addressing THOSE concerns), the better your bullshit. An easy to spot straw man just gets you modded down, but a well crafted one can leave oponents furious complaining about what appear to be cosmetic differences between what you stated and their actual position. This technique takes practice.
If you've BS'd well, the only people who will be able to refute you are people who worked harder at their bullshit, or real live experts on the subject.
I have personally started to move away from these tactics, because after a while a decent human being starts to feel dirty, but I imagine if you looked through my posts you'd be hard pressed to tell which ones I actually knew what I was talking about and which ones are utter bullshit in a subject I know nothing about.
Cheers!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Or perhaps you know, Microsoft could better design their OS to not break when one component is removed.
EVERY OS relies on an HTML rendering component. This isn't unique to Windows, it's just that Windows is the only OS that people get pissy about.
They seem to have taken IE, tied it into everything and they decided that they better make it into a library for convenience sake, rather than build a library and use it.
The built the library (that's what MSHTML is) and IE at the same time. The library for all applications to use, that was the point of it.
I'm designing a library at the moment that requires another library to function. I've designed it in such a way that if there's a better library option in the future I can remove a single file (that contains the code for interacting with the dependency) and replace it with another.
MSHTML is designed that way, too. It's no secret what it's doing, or how to replicate it's interface.
One of the first things I learned about designing software well was that coupling is a Bad Thing and should be avoided. It's a shame that some people in Microsoft can't seem to get this through their heads.
So far, you haven't shown that Microsoft's done anything different than you would do/are doing. On the contrary, you seem to be utterly clueless of how Windows and MSHTML work, but you're OK posting here and just spewing your ignorance all over the web... kudos for that, I guess.
Yes there is but it will take Microsoft to do the work, which is the way around it should be.
Why should Microsoft do the work? They've already provided all the tools required, it's up to some other browser maker to use them. It's not Microsoft's fault that nobody's bothered.
They have many smart people that could pick apart the mess and write a layer that would allow for different engines to be written while allowing 3rd party apps to continue to function as they have been doing.
Oh yeah, imagine the headline on this site... "Microsoft engineers steal Mozilla rendering engine! Horrible plot to murder all open source supporters!!!"
Again, the layer is already there. And you're completely clueless.
This would required management to step out of the way though and allow developers to write the code they (probably) wanted to write in the first place.
The code is already fucking written! Jesus Christ! It has been for a decade!!
People like you piss me off. You make some idiotic assumption about Microsoft, which isn't even close to true, then you post this long rant where you keep drawing all these *other* conclusions based on your wrong assumption. Would it be so hard to add in a "I think that" or "if this is the case" or SOMETHING in your post to indicate that you're just spewing bullshit all over?
Believe me, there's enough bullshit on the web already. Please don't add your own to the pile, if you're not sure DON'T POST.
Comment of the year