Worse than that, a system would be required to make up leakage and constantly top off the cylinders. A hose running up the tower dedicated to this function? Add a few more thousands of kilograms.
For that, you would need to provide one or two examples of journalists being 'bought'.
Why? Who says? Courts convict on circumstancial evidence all the time. When formulating my own opinions, I frequently find I need draw conclusions based on imprecise or sparse data. I think we all do, at some point or another. I don't think one can navigate through life if they are unable to make a decision without hard evidence. As indicated, I believe I have seen enough to come to my own conclusion on this issue. When we are dealing with a convicted monopolist, we need to be more critical and more sceptical of expiating evidence - it's just common sense. You seem to have a contrary point of view. Thank you for sharing that. Different points of view make this world a more interesting place to be. May you live long and prosper:-)
not any evidence whatsoever in response to the GPs question.
Our mission is to establish Microsoft's platforms as the de facto standards throughout the computer industry.... Working behind the scenes to orchestrate "independent" praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy's, is a key evangelism function during the Slog. "Independent" analyst's report should be issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring them).
"Independent" consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting them up as experts in the new technology, available for just $200/hour).
"Independent" academic sources should be cultivated and quoted (and research money granted).
"Independent" courseware providers should start profiting from their early involvement in our technology. Every possible source of leverage should be sought and turned to our advantage.
I think that is some evidence. I combined that with my own observations. Your observations may be different than mine.
anything from Groklaw should be dismissed out of hand due to incredible bias.
Yes, Groklaw is biased - towards those in favour of upholding the rule of law whether it's against convicted monopolies or scam artists trying to destroy Linux. However, they do supply a link to just about every little detail backing up whatever is the subject of the day. This permits the reader to follow the evidence and come to their own conclusions, as you have just done.
When I saw this story on Slashdot just now I thought - is this a story or a paid commercial promotion? It is clearly way to soon to be evaluating the impact of bling (or whatever it is called - I am not paid to help establish brand recognition so I won't repeat it). It should also be obvious that there will be a lot who will click it out of curiosity alone and never go back again, as I did. Since Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to spend a fortune to promote bling, all articles become suspect since we are all well aware of how Microsoft routinely buys journalists and bloggers, and that in fact this is their preferred method these days. In the end, I arrived at the decision that this is simply a timley story like any other to the Slashdot editors who know that we are interested in all things Microsoft. Obviously this site wouldn't enjoy the success it does if they pass off paid commercial promotions as subject matter, but there are so many others doing this that if I were an editor I would take pains to avoid even the appearance of such a thing.
Re:Unix, a blackhole of incompetence and conservat
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft really can't take the position of ruining itself, though- that is, ceding the most important spot on the desktop, the browser. They will fight for the right to offer a browser on their desktop to remain relevant on the web.
This is why we are all so grateful to see the EU stepping in to level the playing field.
Re:Unix, a blackhole of incompetence and conservat
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
When you're offering a platform, you're also offering a supported web experience.
Who says? I say the OS is irrelevant today. You should be able to tun the web experience of your choice on it. If we are speaking specifically about Windows here, we definitely don't want their "web experience" integrated. Microsoft holds a monopoly on the desk top. We certainly don't want them extending this to the web. The danger of monoculture is another thing to avoid.
Re:Unix, a blackhole of incompetence and conservat
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Offering an operating system without a default web browser now-a-days is pretty sad...
Careful there - that's a meme the MS shills are trying to establish ahead of the EU ruling, and I am sure you wouldn't want to consciously repeat that. In the first place, the vast majority of consumers receive an OS when they buy the computer, so whoever sells the computer will be happy to install a browser, or several browsers, or the browser of the user's choice. Computers sold to businesses often have tech support who should be able to install a browser without too much difficulty (meaning none at all). For any case not just covered, a friend with a browser downloaded onto a thumb drive will do the trick nicely. Absolutely no need at all for the OS to come with a browser.
Well what do you expect? Maybe if we stopped eating them and showed them more respect, they might talk to us. Like, if we banned fishing them for food, and instead establish bilateral talks with them, that could be a new beginning for man-squid relations. Then perhaps we could go on to establish trade links - like - we could trade them sardines and anchovies for ink and cuttle fish bone, to begin with. From there, perhaps we could get them to represent our interests with the octopus... When you begin treating others with respect, all kinds of possibilities begin to present themselves, as Obama has demonstrated in his recent speech in Egypt.
I've been working on this backwards. I developed this wonderful spectrum analyser and now would like to stick it into a graphic environment where various visual events are generated from analysis of the audio. Download it and load in a wav file or mp3 and you will see the display. Individual musical notes are displayed. Then you could control a graphic based on the flow of the music, for example. Of course, it has all been done before, but I don't believe I have seen this level of resolution done in real time before. Ideas?
You need to know a smattering of HTML. The line break is which of coarse just broke this line instead of displaying.
What I did was left_angle_bracket followed by br followed by right_angle_bracket. This sentence begins with left_angle_bracket followed by p followed by right_angle_bracket, and ends with left_angle_bracket followed by forward_slash followed by p followed by right_angle_bracket
It is not your machine or earphones, or the codec that is attenuating hi frequencies. Look carefully at the spectrogram accompanying the image. You can expand the image to hi resolution to examine it more carefully. You will note that the peak amplitudes of the frequencies generated cluster from around 500 Hz to 1500 Hz, with much lower amplitudes outside of that range.
All joking aside, and in the spirit of dupes, here I am reposting my only original thoughts on this issues from several pages on, because I think it is important...
Microsoft is preparing for the day a ruling comes out from the EU that will end IE's position as the default browser. It is preparing itself for a world where IE no longer dominates. It is doing this by developing techniques such as it did with the Firefox extension to continue leveraging the browser as it always did to extend its monopoly on the desktop onto the web. This whole fiasco was a trial balloon, to see how much it can get away with. Microsoft is able to easily rationalize why the Firefox extension was pushed out and uninstallable. The next attack on browsers will be less of a shock to us, and have less justification. Finally they will establish this as common practise, doing things like automatically adding Silverlight plug-ins to all browsers, and people won't even blink an eye. We will be exhausted after having discussed all the dupes on Slashdot about this at each attempt.
Microsoft is preparing for the day a ruling comes out from the EU that will end IE's position as the default browser. It is preparing itself for a world where IE no longer dominates, by developing techniques such as it did with the Firefox extension to continue leveraging the browser as it always did to extend its monopoly on the desktop onto the web. This whole fiasco was a trial balloon, to see how much it can get away with. Microsoft is able to easily rationalize why the Firefox extension was pushed out and uninstallable. The next attack on browsers will be less of a shock to us, and have less justification. Finally they will establish this as common practise, doing things like automatically adding Silverlight plug-ins to all browsers, and people won't even blink an eye. We will be exhausted after having discussed all the dupes on Slashdot about this at each attempt.
To save you all the trouble of reading the previous Slashdot discussion, I have summarized it below.
What does this Firefox extension do?
1.) It installs a BHO (Browser Helper Object)
2.) The.Net Framework Assistant also changes the User-Agent string of the Firefox browser, adding "(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
A Browser Helper Object (BHO) is a DLL module designed as a plugin for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to provide added functionality.
"BHO can be used to install additional features or functions that are useful, it can also be exploited to install features or functions that are malicious. Some applications, such as the Google or Yahoo toolbars, are examples of good BHO's. But, there are also many examples of BHO's which are used to hijack your Web browser home page, spy on your Internet activities and other malicious actions."
The author on this site goes on to say: "If you are really concerned about bad BHO's and their affect on the overall security of your computer, you can just switch browsers. BHO's are unique to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and do not impact other Web browser applications such as Firefox."
Now that Microsoft has infected Firefox with this extension, his advice in the line above is obsolete!
The following phrases were copied and pasted wholesale, directly from the previous Slashdot discussion without attribution (except in one case where I copied the entire text of one submitter's comment).
The.Net Framework Assistant also changes the User-Agent string of the Firefox browser, adding "(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)", so infected sites can better detect which MS vulnerability to exploit.
The.NET framework is not required for Firefox to run. Why would any sane person assume installing a totally unrelated framework would scribble all over Firefox?
It most definitely IS unexpected, because I was never notified anywhere that a MICROSOFT update would entail installing an addon to a completely NON-Microsoft product.
How are they allowed to get away with this? Isn't installing BHOs that are not asked for and cannot be uninstalled without hacking pretty much the definition of malware?
Microsoft modified *another company's products*. What's next? MS is going to start adding updates to VLC player or Utorrent or OpenOffice or WordPerfect?!?!? They shouldn't be messing with non-microsoft products.
Microsoft is doing this in an update without notifying its users (as far as has been reported) that this update will be modifying third party software with no easy way to prevent or uninstall the change.
The true question here is not how to uninstall it. The question everyone should be asking is: is it messing with other settings in firefox, reporting back to MS what other extensions I use, monitoring my web traffic, going to break my browser, new security holes?
Ok Microsoft, you are making automatic changes to software written by other companies without permission or request of the user. I don't care if you say it's just an extension, you didn't ask me!
The precedent has already been established that the OS can be configured to require the local administrator to give explicit permission for each patch to be applied; the outrage here is that this time, that choice was not offered, and the affected software was neither part of the operating system nor even a Microsoft product.
For those of you who are assuming it's probably safe (and admittedly, you're probably right), there's another good reason to get rid of it. Microsoft changing your browser string to indicate that this piece of software is installed in your browser. The purpose of this, most likely, is to increase the installed base for this software, and use that as an argument
This is really bad. In tomorrows conference to be presented by the Conference Board of Canada, we see who two of their sponsors are:
"The Conference Board of Canada would like to acknowledge the contribution of the following individuals and organizations in the development of this conference:"
Graham Henderson
President
Canadian Recording
Industry Association
Wendy Noss
Executive Director
Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association
Tomorrows conference is all about Intellectual Property Rights. They state: "Effective IPR protection is essential to capitalize on innovation and encourage R&D investment. Canada needs world-class intellectual property policy and practices to compete globally. Policymakers and business leaders need to recognize IPR's crucial role in enabling businesses to capitalize on development investments and successfully commercialize their innovations."
The whole thing is obviously a massive lobbying effort on behalf of their sponsors (clients?). The Conference Board of Canada are clearly advocates of IP, and therefore have a strong conflict of interest when it comes to doing any "independent" research on this topic. In no way, shape. or form can they possibly be independend.
Under their retraction they provide a contact link. I clicked on that link and gave them my thoughts as pasted below, and the acknowledgement promises a response. Will get back to you on upon their reply.
Dear Sir/Madam,
After almost selling out Canada to the USA via your plagiarized reports on intellectual property, I would strongly suggest that you contract Prof. Michael Geist or at least work closely with him in the next effort. Michael is well know, extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and trusted by a large number of Canadians. Only in this way will you regain the prestige you once had.
"Even Microsoft, for all its seeming omnipotence and monopolistic behavior, would have failed long ago had it not finally gotten off its duff to address -- however imperfectly -- things like Linux, OS/2, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and so forth."
It's getting to a point where the legitimacy of senseless Microsoft-bashing is at an all-time low.
It's getting to a point where Microsoft's credibility is at an all time low. Microsoft hasn't changed a bit - though they would like us to believe that and have a team of revisionists trying to rewrite history for us right here on Slashdot. As to "...how Microsoft is opening up to ODF support in Office", yes lets talk about that. They are implementing ODF via malicious compliance - deliberately trying to destroy ODF by introducing a version with SP2 for Office 2007 which does not interoperate with any other word processor. This was a clear statement from Microsoft to the ODF Aliance saying "go fuck yourself" and was a slap in the face to all of us. It demonstartates the utter contempt Microsoft holds for us all. There is nothing commendable about Microsoft's attitude towards IE. They established dominance via illegal bundling, and continue to bundle it, leveraging their monopoly on the desk top to grow their web related technologies. They play dirty, and are a bad example for our children.
I won't lie to you, Microsoft probably killed the business of making money from browsers irrevocably. But I think that was for the better. I think making other browsers have to be truly so much superior to IE in order to convince them to switch was necessary for the fundamental shift toward more advanced and more standardized web capabilities.
What a silly argument! How did this ever got modded as 'insightful'? In the first place, if there was true competition among browser all along, the force of competition would ensure survival of the fitest from the very beginning. At a minimum, you would still have exactly the same evolution. More likely, we would have seen many more companies involved in browser design over a longer period and consequently even more innovation. As it has been with IE dominating the market, very few companies/organization have the requisite resources to even think about developing a browser. IE's dominance stifled innovation for many years, to the detriment of us all, and to the detriment of web standards. Who knows maybe web standards would be much more highly evolved at this point otherwise? Like maybe we would already have HTML 5 and maybe even 6? Make no mistake, Microsoft's illegal bundling of IE has been very bad for the whole world, and there is no up side to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware of that. Could you please elaborate on that, with authoritative references? Thank you.
So where is Alex Brown's Wikipedia page? Here
Worse than that, a system would be required to make up leakage and constantly top off the cylinders. A hose running up the tower dedicated to this function? Add a few more thousands of kilograms.
Why? Who says? Courts convict on circumstancial evidence all the time. When formulating my own opinions, I frequently find I need draw conclusions based on imprecise or sparse data. I think we all do, at some point or another. I don't think one can navigate through life if they are unable to make a decision without hard evidence. As indicated, I believe I have seen enough to come to my own conclusion on this issue. When we are dealing with a convicted monopolist, we need to be more critical and more sceptical of expiating evidence - it's just common sense. You seem to have a contrary point of view. Thank you for sharing that. Different points of view make this world a more interesting place to be. May you live long and prosper :-)
I think that is some evidence. I combined that with my own observations. Your observations may be different than mine.
Yes, Groklaw is biased - towards those in favour of upholding the rule of law whether it's against convicted monopolies or scam artists trying to destroy Linux. However, they do supply a link to just about every little detail backing up whatever is the subject of the day. This permits the reader to follow the evidence and come to their own conclusions, as you have just done.
Summarized PDF
When I saw this story on Slashdot just now I thought - is this a story or a paid commercial promotion? It is clearly way to soon to be evaluating the impact of bling (or whatever it is called - I am not paid to help establish brand recognition so I won't repeat it). It should also be obvious that there will be a lot who will click it out of curiosity alone and never go back again, as I did. Since Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to spend a fortune to promote bling, all articles become suspect since we are all well aware of how Microsoft routinely buys journalists and bloggers, and that in fact this is their preferred method these days. In the end, I arrived at the decision that this is simply a timley story like any other to the Slashdot editors who know that we are interested in all things Microsoft. Obviously this site wouldn't enjoy the success it does if they pass off paid commercial promotions as subject matter, but there are so many others doing this that if I were an editor I would take pains to avoid even the appearance of such a thing.
Microsoft really can't take the position of ruining itself, though- that is, ceding the most important spot on the desktop, the browser. They will fight for the right to offer a browser on their desktop to remain relevant on the web.
This is why we are all so grateful to see the EU stepping in to level the playing field.
When you're offering a platform, you're also offering a supported web experience.
Who says? I say the OS is irrelevant today. You should be able to tun the web experience of your choice on it. If we are speaking specifically about Windows here, we definitely don't want their "web experience" integrated. Microsoft holds a monopoly on the desk top. We certainly don't want them extending this to the web. The danger of monoculture is another thing to avoid.
Careful there - that's a meme the MS shills are trying to establish ahead of the EU ruling, and I am sure you wouldn't want to consciously repeat that. In the first place, the vast majority of consumers receive an OS when they buy the computer, so whoever sells the computer will be happy to install a browser, or several browsers, or the browser of the user's choice. Computers sold to businesses often have tech support who should be able to install a browser without too much difficulty (meaning none at all). For any case not just covered, a friend with a browser downloaded onto a thumb drive will do the trick nicely. Absolutely no need at all for the OS to come with a browser.
Well what do you expect? Maybe if we stopped eating them and showed them more respect, they might talk to us. Like, if we banned fishing them for food, and instead establish bilateral talks with them, that could be a new beginning for man-squid relations. Then perhaps we could go on to establish trade links - like - we could trade them sardines and anchovies for ink and cuttle fish bone, to begin with. From there, perhaps we could get them to represent our interests with the octopus... When you begin treating others with respect, all kinds of possibilities begin to present themselves, as Obama has demonstrated in his recent speech in Egypt.
I've been working on this backwards. I developed this wonderful spectrum analyser and now would like to stick it into a graphic environment where various visual events are generated from analysis of the audio. Download it and load in a wav file or mp3 and you will see the display. Individual musical notes are displayed. Then you could control a graphic based on the flow of the music, for example. Of course, it has all been done before, but I don't believe I have seen this level of resolution done in real time before. Ideas?
To get real time sound effects, to begin with you will need use a better audio driver such as ASIO. DirectX just won't cut it because of the latency.
You need to know a smattering of HTML. The line break is
which of coarse just broke this line instead of displaying. What I did was left_angle_bracket followed by br followed by right_angle_bracket. This sentence begins with left_angle_bracket followed by p followed by right_angle_bracket, and ends with left_angle_bracket followed by forward_slash followed by p followed by right_angle_bracket
It is not your machine or earphones, or the codec that is attenuating hi frequencies. Look carefully at the spectrogram accompanying the image. You can expand the image to hi resolution to examine it more carefully. You will note that the peak amplitudes of the frequencies generated cluster from around 500 Hz to 1500 Hz, with much lower amplitudes outside of that range.
All joking aside, and in the spirit of dupes, here I am reposting my only original thoughts on this issues from several pages on, because I think it is important...
Microsoft is preparing for the day a ruling comes out from the EU that will end IE's position as the default browser. It is preparing itself for a world where IE no longer dominates. It is doing this by developing techniques such as it did with the Firefox extension to continue leveraging the browser as it always did to extend its monopoly on the desktop onto the web. This whole fiasco was a trial balloon, to see how much it can get away with. Microsoft is able to easily rationalize why the Firefox extension was pushed out and uninstallable. The next attack on browsers will be less of a shock to us, and have less justification. Finally they will establish this as common practise, doing things like automatically adding Silverlight plug-ins to all browsers, and people won't even blink an eye. We will be exhausted after having discussed all the dupes on Slashdot about this at each attempt.
Microsoft is preparing for the day a ruling comes out from the EU that will end IE's position as the default browser. It is preparing itself for a world where IE no longer dominates, by developing techniques such as it did with the Firefox extension to continue leveraging the browser as it always did to extend its monopoly on the desktop onto the web. This whole fiasco was a trial balloon, to see how much it can get away with. Microsoft is able to easily rationalize why the Firefox extension was pushed out and uninstallable. The next attack on browsers will be less of a shock to us, and have less justification. Finally they will establish this as common practise, doing things like automatically adding Silverlight plug-ins to all browsers, and people won't even blink an eye. We will be exhausted after having discussed all the dupes on Slashdot about this at each attempt.
To save you all the trouble of reading the previous Slashdot discussion, I have summarized it below.
What does this Firefox extension do?
1.) It installs a BHO (Browser Helper Object) .Net Framework Assistant also changes the User-Agent string of the Firefox browser, adding "(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
2.) The
A Browser Helper Object (BHO) is a DLL module designed as a plugin for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to provide added functionality.
"BHO can be used to install additional features or functions that are useful, it can also be exploited to install features or functions that are malicious. Some applications, such as the Google or Yahoo toolbars, are examples of good BHO's. But, there are also many examples of BHO's which are used to hijack your Web browser home page, spy on your Internet activities and other malicious actions."
The author on this site goes on to say: "If you are really concerned about bad BHO's and their affect on the overall security of your computer, you can just switch browsers. BHO's are unique to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and do not impact other Web browser applications such as Firefox."
Now that Microsoft has infected Firefox with this extension, his advice in the line above is obsolete!
The following phrases were copied and pasted wholesale, directly from the previous Slashdot discussion without attribution (except in one case where I copied the entire text of one submitter's comment).
The .Net Framework Assistant also changes the User-Agent string of the Firefox browser, adding "(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)", so infected sites can better detect which MS vulnerability to exploit.
The .NET framework is not required for Firefox to run. Why would any sane person assume installing a totally unrelated framework would scribble all over Firefox?
It most definitely IS unexpected, because I was never notified anywhere that a MICROSOFT update would entail installing an addon to a completely NON-Microsoft product.
How are they allowed to get away with this? Isn't installing BHOs that are not asked for and cannot be uninstalled without hacking pretty much the definition of malware?
Microsoft modified *another company's products*. What's next? MS is going to start adding updates to VLC player or Utorrent or OpenOffice or WordPerfect?!?!? They shouldn't be messing with non-microsoft products.
Microsoft is doing this in an update without notifying its users (as far as has been reported) that this update will be modifying third party software with no easy way to prevent or uninstall the change.
The true question here is not how to uninstall it. The question everyone should be asking is: is it messing with other settings in firefox, reporting back to MS what other extensions I use, monitoring my web traffic, going to break my browser, new security holes?
Ok Microsoft, you are making automatic changes to software written by other companies without permission or request of the user. I don't care if you say it's just an extension, you didn't ask me!
The precedent has already been established that the OS can be configured to require the local administrator to give explicit permission for each patch to be applied; the outrage here is that this time, that choice was not offered, and the affected software was neither part of the operating system nor even a Microsoft product.
For those of you who are assuming it's probably safe (and admittedly, you're probably right), there's another good reason to get rid of it. Microsoft changing your browser string to indicate that this piece of software is installed in your browser. The purpose of this, most likely, is to increase the installed base for this software, and use that as an argument
You may find this interesting A virtual recreation of an ancient instrument from the 6th century BC
This is really bad. In tomorrows conference to be presented by the Conference Board of Canada, we see who two of their sponsors are:
"The Conference Board of Canada would like to acknowledge the contribution of the following individuals and organizations in the development of this conference:"
Graham Henderson
President
Canadian Recording
Industry Association
Wendy Noss
Executive Director
Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association
Tomorrows conference is all about Intellectual Property Rights. They state: "Effective IPR protection is essential to capitalize on innovation and encourage R&D investment. Canada needs world-class intellectual property policy and practices to compete globally. Policymakers and business leaders need to recognize IPR's crucial role in enabling businesses to capitalize on development investments and successfully commercialize their innovations."
The whole thing is obviously a massive lobbying effort on behalf of their sponsors (clients?). The Conference Board of Canada are clearly advocates of IP, and therefore have a strong conflict of interest when it comes to doing any "independent" research on this topic. In no way, shape. or form can they possibly be independend.
Under their retraction they provide a contact link. I clicked on that link and gave them my thoughts as pasted below, and the acknowledgement promises a response. Will get back to you on upon their reply.
Dear Sir/Madam,
After almost selling out Canada to the USA via your plagiarized reports on intellectual property, I would strongly suggest that you contract Prof. Michael Geist or at least work closely with him in the next effort. Michael is well know, extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and trusted by a large number of Canadians. Only in this way will you regain the prestige you once had.
Sincerely,
...
"Even Microsoft, for all its seeming omnipotence and monopolistic behavior, would have failed long ago had it not finally gotten off its duff to address -- however imperfectly -- things like Linux, OS/2, WordPerfect , Lotus 1-2-3, and so forth."
He was using a bad analogy.
It's getting to a point where Microsoft's credibility is at an all time low. Microsoft hasn't changed a bit - though they would like us to believe that and have a team of revisionists trying to rewrite history for us right here on Slashdot. As to "...how Microsoft is opening up to ODF support in Office", yes lets talk about that. They are implementing ODF via malicious compliance - deliberately trying to destroy ODF by introducing a version with SP2 for Office 2007 which does not interoperate with any other word processor. This was a clear statement from Microsoft to the ODF Aliance saying "go fuck yourself" and was a slap in the face to all of us. It demonstartates the utter contempt Microsoft holds for us all. There is nothing commendable about Microsoft's attitude towards IE. They established dominance via illegal bundling, and continue to bundle it, leveraging their monopoly on the desk top to grow their web related technologies. They play dirty, and are a bad example for our children.
What a silly argument! How did this ever got modded as 'insightful'? In the first place, if there was true competition among browser all along, the force of competition would ensure survival of the fitest from the very beginning. At a minimum, you would still have exactly the same evolution. More likely, we would have seen many more companies involved in browser design over a longer period and consequently even more innovation. As it has been with IE dominating the market, very few companies/organization have the requisite resources to even think about developing a browser. IE's dominance stifled innovation for many years, to the detriment of us all, and to the detriment of web standards. Who knows maybe web standards would be much more highly evolved at this point otherwise? Like maybe we would already have HTML 5 and maybe even 6? Make no mistake, Microsoft's illegal bundling of IE has been very bad for the whole world, and there is no up side to it.