if they take Opera seriously, we will be left to wonder where this complaint was back in the 20th century

if the EU really wants to fight MS, here's a suggestion: give the citizens a tax rebate when they install a non-MS OS

A

Maxthon is the 'zippiest' of all browsers and yet it is built on the IE engine. It's from China and has spotty English support and occasionally odd/brokem multimedia but it's wicked fast. In fact there's a whole community of add-on browsers that built on IE w/o the IE crud overhead.

If the author of this piece provided links to the things that he is talking about so that others can engage him in reasonable discourse without the typical reply from the author of: "well, I actually read the docuement, and apparently you didn't."

The issue today isn't so much that Microsoft has a monopoly, it's that it's using it poorly to the detriment of the web and of competing browser vendors. As a web software engineer, I feel this pain nearly every day. Every other browser on the market is significantly more advanced and better performing than IE, but due to the nature of the web, no content authors will reasonably upgrade their content to use newer browser features until 90+% of the deployed browsers support them, and that means waiting for Redmond's Godot.

The counter arguments to this are, variously, that Microsoft released a new browser under a year ago and that Microsoft owes us nothing (after all, the browser is free). The "MS owes us nothing" argument doesn't hold up to even the most basic scrutiny of the competitive landscape, so the discussion turns to their stewardship of their browser monopoly. It has been, to put it mildly, abysmal. After the IE6 release (circa 2000) microsoft actually *disbanded* the IE team. The recent IE7 release is only a minor upgrade over the IE 6 state of the art. In the year since IE7 Microsoft has released nearly no information about their forthcoming browser plans (see the hundreds and hundreds of comments here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx), leaving web developers to wonder if and how the web will ever improve for building more sophisticated forms of applications. All manner of projects are now under way with the explicit goal of "hot patching" IE's flaws due to the extreme lack of progress which holds down the progress of the entire web (notably, Google Gears and the Mozilla Foundation's Screaming Monkey).

Opera's suit may be the wrong way to approach the problem, they'd do better by distributing Gears, but their frustration and the basic gist of their compliant is entirely valid. Microsoft has not made good for it's users on the monopoly it won. As a result, it is creating opportunity for it's own competing development platforms (Silverlight, etc.) and is hurting the chances of web browser vendors who really are improving things. Neglect is also abuse, and I think that in this case it does rise to the level which would imply abuse of Microsoft's browser monopoly.

Regards

How about letting the user decide?

I am free to ignore Safari on Mac OS and use Firefox or whatever instead, Apple does not force me to use their browser. I can use my Mac all day without going near Safari.

On Linux, I can use whatever browser I want. The browser is not even really part of the system, and you don't even need to install one if you are not going to use the computer to surf the web.

But it's not possible to run Windows without IE installed. Maybe in someone's twisted imagination it might be possible, but you certainly will not be able to run Windows Update to install updates. IE is wired into the OS so thoroughly that you just can't rip it out. It uses undocumented API calls so that it can do things that no other browser can. If Apple did something similar with OSX, there would be an outcry. And of course there is no such thing as an "undocumented API call" on Linux.

If Microsoft were really interested in competing with the other browsers, it would untie IE from the OS so that the other browsers could operate with the same functionality as IE.

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and as such, it is required to discontinue its practices that inhibit its competitors.

Until you can run Windows Update successfully in Firefox or Opera, Microsoft should be considered to be continuing to abuse its monopoly.

A significant number of websites would stop working. IE is large enough and different enough so that web builders do often exploit lesser know unique functions in it. This means that there is a goodly number of websites that only work, or work well with IE (the IE engine at any rate). This is why FF add ons like IETab exist, to take advantage of switching out the engine on the fly where a website can't work right with FF.

And, as I said before there is already a good number of browers that use the IE engine like Maxthon so I'm not sure what beating Microsoft over the head about this, accomplishes.

Lastly, IE7 is not that bad. It's waaaay better than 6 albeit it has enough incompatibilities with 6 to keep it from being rolled out in corporate houses that build lots of in house apps with IE.

Just have the browsers evaluated by the standards board to determine whether they are "standards-compliant" or not.

IE isn't, and never will be, so it gets no "standards-compliant" label.

Opera shouldn't be worrying about the effective monopoly of Windows, they should be focused on making a better browser. (A better browser than Internet Exploder isn't much of a challenge, I admit.)

Just let people decide whether they want standards-compliant software, or if they want MS's "custom" crap.

Much cheaper, and likely more effective, than trying to sue MS.

There are also other browsers that use the Firefox engine, just like there are other browsers that use the IE engine. Your statement is true, but it doesn't prove anything. What you say does not justify tying the browser, or even its engine, to the OS. Come on, try again.

If there are web sites out there that only work with IE, that is because those sites ALSO do not conform to the open standards that "the rest of us" have all agreed upon. If your computer does not adhere to the TCP/IP specification and generates invalid packets, your service provider is perfectly within its rights to disconnect you from the Internet until your computer is brought into compliance. Web sites that do not adhere to web standards ought to be treated similarly.