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EU Accepts Microsoft's Browser Choice Promise
itwbennett writes "Hurrah! The European Commission's antitrust investigation of Microsoft's position in the browser market is over. The EC has accepted Microsoft's commitment to offer users of 'Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 a choice screen through which they can pick the browsers they want to install on their PC,' writes Peter Sayer in an article on ITworld. 'The screen will be offered to users in the European Union and some neighboring countries for the next five years via the Windows Update mechanism. In addition, PC manufacturers will be allowed to ship computers with competing Web browsers, as well as or instead of Internet Explorer.'"
Seems to me if MS has to comply with this, Apple should be held to the same standard.
Apple is not in a monopoly position, MS is. Different rules apply when you are, specifically about abusing your monopoly power in one area (e.g. operating systems) to muscle your way into another (e.g. web browsers).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Anti-competitive behaviour is not like murder. That's an unfair comparison.
MS was fined 1.3 billion for past behaviour. This promise is needed for them not to get future fines:
http://slashdot.org/yro/08/02/27/1152208.shtml?tid=98
A lot of intranet applications require proprietary ActiveX / OCX controls, which only work in IE (I think). I've also seen quite a few intranet applications that run with VBScript, which also requires IE (again, I think).
Vista and Windows 7 don't use IE for Microsoft Update, but nice try.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
IE8 is certainly a step in the right direction, and I will be so happy when IE6 finally eats flaming death; but there are still glaring omissions. Not that any browser is a model citizen in this regard, but IE is definitely worst. Now I'm aware that it is possible to work your way around the differences, I just finished a library to be used internally that emulates W3C-compliant DOM events in IE; but I'd rather spend my time doing actual development than working around browser bugs (which 99% of the time are caused by various incarnations of IE).
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. They have lots of power (90% of computers) that triggers a group of laws that limits what they can do. Are you getting this in your brain?
Apple is under no legal obligation to sell anything on their hardware, nor is any other hardware vendor. They are not powerful enough to trigger the laws Microsoft has triggered, and therefore do not have any limitations on what they can ship their computers with.
You haven't been working much in a corporate environment, have you?
This is blinging