Recently it became known that the European Union is charging Microsoft with anticompetitive behaviour concerning its Internet Explorer web browser. The EU is considering forcing OEMs to offer consumers a choice of browser. Opera responded quite positively to these events, and now Mozilla has responded as well: they fully support the EU.
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Member since:2007-03-07
> Ever heard of illegally leveraging a monopoly to
> gain another? That's what MS did. They've been
> convicted of it in the US and in the EU.
There is nothing illegal about bundling a browser with your operating system--even if it is one you write yourself. That's the point here.
If the EU is going to say MS has to give users a choice during system setup, then they have to place the same requirement on Apple. In fact, Safari has more market share on Apple than IE does on Windows.
And well they are at it, they should nail Apple for their iTunes / iPod monopoly.
Edited 2009-02-10 17:18 UTC
Member since:2007-03-06
> gain another? That's what MS did. They've been
> convicted of it in the US and in the EU.
There is nothing illegal about bundling a browser with your operating system--even if it is one you write yourself. That's the point here.
No, that's not the point here, and that's not what he was talking about.
Re-read what you quoted.
Member since:2005-07-27
During most of the Bush 8 years in office, Microsoft had was, in your words, a "slap on the wrist" and maintained its dominance in the market. Yet something strange happened. Internet Explorer, within a matter of a few months, lost more than 20% of the market, even when the parent company, AOL, of its main competitor, Mozilla, didn't use Gecko in its software. Microsoft leveraged its monopoly by including Internet Explorer in XP SP3 and Vista, and yet, by some strange occurance, Internet Explorer kept losing market share.
And then something stranger occured. Microsoft decided in IE 8, default on monopolizing Windows 7, to have standards compliant rendering the default option.
What, did they forgot how to abuse their monopolitic position?
Member since:2007-02-17
Neither IE7 nor IE8 get anywhere close to standards compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_explorer#Features
does not support XHTML, though it can render XHTML documents authored with HTML compatibility principles and served with a text/html MIME-type.
does not support SVG, neither for current version 7.0, nor for upcoming 8.0 version.
Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between "quirks mode" (renders similarly to older versions of MSIE) and standards mode (renders closer to W3C's specifications) for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript.
Internet Explorer has been subjected to criticism over its limited support for open web standards.
Standards extensions
Internet Explorer has introduced an array of proprietary extensions to many of the standards, including HTML, CSS and the DOM. This has resulted in a number of web pages that can only be viewed properly using Internet Explorer.
IE misses out almost completely on DOM2 and other useful rich-web-content standards such as SVG and SMIL. Instead, it tries to introduce the proprietary Silverlight as a "standard" for rich web content.
It is precisely for this reason, coupled with the fact that it is un-removeable from Windows, that gets IE into such hot water.
Member since:
2006-09-10
Ever heard of illegally leveraging a monopoly to gain another? That's what MS did. They've been convicted of it in the US and in the EU. In the US they were about to get there arses handed to them when the Bush administration came into power and basically had the whole thing commuted to a slap on the wrist.