Opera vs. IE: Round One, Fight!
I'm getting this feeling of deja vu... haven't we been through all this before? Today Opera filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. According to Opera, the makers of an alternative web browser, Microsoft is using its dominant position to unfairly influence the web browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and by "not following accepted Web standards," which Opera says causes developers to create web pages specifically for IE that break in other browsers -- and thus lowers the incentive for users to switch.
The solution? Opera wants the EU to force Microsoft to stop bundling IE, or to bundle other browsers with the OS (i.e., Opera). They also request that the EU make Microsoft follow "fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities."
This is not an unfamiliar argument to Microsoft -- that tiff with the Justice Department was about much the same thing. But, as Larry Dignan points out, Opera might find a more receptive audience in the European Union than Netscape found in the US DoJ. The European Union has already ruled that bundling Windows Media Player with Windows was illegal, so a precedent in Opera's favor appears to exist (note: I am not a lawyer).
"Our complaint is necessary to get Microsoft to amend its practices," said Jason Hoida, Deputy General Counsel for Opera, in a press release."The European Court of First Instance confirmed in September that Microsoft has illegally tied Windows Media Player to Windows. We are simply asking the Commission to apply these same, clear principles to the Internet Explorer tie, a tie that has even more profound effects on consumers and innovation."
Hold on to your hats. This one is just getting started...
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"Firefox is THE Standards-compliant browser."
This is a myth, actually, spread by an ill-informed techno-cult. Read the w3c specs and see how MUCH of it has been implemented by MS and FF. You will be surprised to see how much FF has NOT implemented, and so much that IE (and Opera for that matter) has already implemented.
And MS makes wise decisions on what NOT to implement generally based on what application makers can appreciate vs. the high-priests at the standards committee. It is good to have a discerning private company like MS do this, rather than puritan programmers who have nothing else to do.
But for whatever little firefox has implemented, it does stick to standards. But it has not any other appeal anymore, other than the cult around it.
It is less secure than IE, due to the high number of add-ons that are required to make it functional. All chrome apps and add-ons are ways of getting access to way more than IE would allow even in its dumbest moments. I would rather have a certified ActiveX than a chrome app.
The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that "just surfs the web", and boy, what an HTML reader they have wrought. Firefox is now supported by all anti-american governments all over the world for obvious retro reasons. Instead, they should support Opera instead, which atleast deserves some support as a commercial entity that is trying to make it.
"In fact, the last time I installed Linux, I was given five different options of Internet Browsers to install (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Konquerer, Safari, and Opera). I don't see why Microsoft couldn't just come bundled with the "big four" (Firefox, IE7.0, Safari, and Opera)."
Good God, thank goodness you're not involved in making decisions at Microsoft, or any other OS provider. The last thing anyone needs is more crap pre-installed on their computer (particularly from ones from OEMs), especially more crap that do the same thing.
Newbies would get totally confused (you mean I have to research which browser to use before surfing the net?), the versions become terribly outdated (I'm still seeing Adobe Reader 7 being delivered on new Lenovo machines), and advanced users would just have a few more things to uninstall when they get their machine.
You will have noticed that by default, most of the friendlier Linux distros just install Firefox for you (and Konqueror if you're using KDE or Nautilus if using Gnome). Yes you can install other browsers on your own, just like you can with Windows. But even Linux distros have woken up and stopped installing multiple things on people's computers that do the same thing.
It serves no good reason, except for browser makers to boast about their install statistics.
And for those who think a browser isn't an integral part of an operating system, I beg to differ. It isn't an integral part as in without it the OS wouldn't work, but without it the OS wouldn't be very useful as a development platform.
More and more desktop apps are integrating web browsers into their app to show dynamic web content (or even develop the interface using it). Windows Media Player, iTunes, Amarok, OSX Dashboard, Vista Sidebar, registration screens for many apps, TomTom Home, Harmony Remote, VMWare Server client, apps with web-like interfaces (i.e. not created from standard desktop widgets) etc. all use a web browser in their app to show various parts and info. You would notice that many of these are apps considered to be the more innovative ones.
If there wasn't a web browser to be expected on the OS,
a) developers would have to include a detection routine in their apps to work out which is available, and then interface with the different browsers, all which will have different APIs (a major pain). They therefore then have to increase their testing procedure multi-fold, as they test each browser on each OS. Tech support would be a pain too.
b) developers would start shipping their product with a browser integrated into it, leaving me with many instances of the same thing, which isn't updated as often as the browser is because the developers are lazy hence leaving my computer open to security risks (or worse, you have to pay to upgrade to the new version with the browser fixes).
c) developers start demanding a certain browser as a prerequisite. This may not sound as bad, but people generally do not like having to download something they didn't ask for, just to make another program work. And if I weren't a developer, I definitely wouldn't want 4 different web browsers sitting on my computer, when I only use one (Firefox).
I do not believe any of the current OSes would be as functional without a browser in-built. They all ship with apps that use it. Sure you can forcefully remove it, but you're effectively stopping yourself from using a range of apps that expect a certain browser to be installed as part of the OS. The browser is as important a desktop widget as the standard toolbar, button, text field etc.
Note I don't care which browser gets bundled with the OS - just that there should be one. There are some interesting browser-independent desktop technologies coming out, like Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR, but none of these allow the integration of desktop apps with the web (they're more aimed at the other way around).
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