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Opera Files EU Complaint Against Microsoft
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Dec 13, 2007 10:35 AM
from the reopening-the-browser-wars dept.
from the reopening-the-browser-wars dept.
A number of readers have sent word about Opera Software ASA's antitrust complaint against Microsoft filed with the EU. Here is Opera's press release on the filing. The company wants the EU to "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop" and to "require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities." The latter request makes this a case to watch. Will the Commissioner take the Acid2 test using IE7?
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[+]
Opera Tells EU That Microsoft's IE Hurts the Web 338 comments
kastababy writes "In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Update: 12/14 19:47 GMT by Z : We also discussed this yesterday.
[+]
EU Launches Yet Another Antitrust Probe Into Microsoft 373 comments
Connor writes "The EU has announced a new wide-ranging antitrust probe into Microsoft's practices of bundling software with Windows, as well as whether its products interoperate sufficiently with competitors' products. 'The first area of investigation will concern interoperability of some of Microsoft's products, including Office 2007, the .NET Framework, and some of Microsoft's server products.' The other prong of the investigation is a response to Opera's antitrust complaint, but will look at other products, too. 'The Commission will also look at desktop search and Windows Live as well in addition to other products. The EC says that its investigation will "focus on allegations that a range of products have been unlawfully tied to sales of Microsoft's dominant operating system."'"
[+]
Technology: Opera Screeches at Mozilla Over Security Disclosure 208 comments
The Register is reporting that Mozilla's handling of a recent security exploit that affected both browsers has drawn an unhappy response from the Opera team. "Claudio Santambrogio, an Opera desktop developer, said the Mozilla team notified it of a security issue only a day before publishing an advisory. This gave the Norwegian software developers insufficient time to make an evaluation. [...] Santambrogio goes on to attack Mozilla's handling of the issue, arguing that it places Opera users at unnecessary risk."
[+]
Technology: IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default 383 comments
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
[+]
EU Antitrust Troubles Continue For Microsoft 593 comments
Julie188 writes "Opera Software's year-old antitrust complaint against Microsoft took another step toward being vindicated, and the Oslo-based browser maker can't help crowing over the European Commission's decision. Opera had filed a complaint with the EC in December, 2007, contending that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust rules. Yesterday, the EC sent a 'Statement of Objections (SO)' to Microsoft with a preliminary finding that bundling IE with Windows does indeed constitute an antitrust abuse. Microsoft has eight weeks to plead its case and change the EC's mind, an unlikely outcome if ever there was one. Opera's CEO said, 'On behalf of all Internet users, we commend the Commission for taking the next step towards restoring competition in a market that Microsoft has strangled for more than a decade.'"
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Good PR for Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and their lawsuit has merit, as well.
Re:I'm not sure this case is a good thing at all (Score:4, Interesting)
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product is made by screwing up open standards to closed, one-'browser'-only-usable ones, thus pushing other browsers out of the market by including this inferior product in a monopolised OS, I think I can see the unethical part of this.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story. It is not as if MS had a big marketshare and someone came up with altered standards to thwart them, but the standards were there before MS decided to alter them for their own purposes and made it impossible for others to use their (MS's) 'standards'.
Disclaimer: I am not a web-developer, and don't even play one on tv.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that, the only places where they differ from
isn't MS already supposed to have unbundled IE? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
Wasn't this part of the settlement before? I often wonder why we have to see other countries doing the heavy lifting to throttle Microsoft. Microsoft lost, was set up for some pretty severe controls to be administered and lucked out with a changing of the guard and a Justice Department that lost any appetite to really control Microsoft.Also,
This one does get interesting. Maybe this is the avenue required to get Microsoft to move closer to compliance on the accepted standards. There certainly hasn't been any bending to pressures from developers.Re: (Score:2, Funny)
This one does get interesting. Maybe this is the avenue required to get Microsoft to move closer to compliance on the accepted standards. There certainly hasn't been any bending to pressures from developers."
Yeah, that's what we need, governments enforcing coding standards. Just wait till you get fined $100 for using 4 spaces instead of a tab.
Re:isn't MS already supposed to have unbundled IE? (Score:5, Insightful)
But we do this all the time. For example, here in the US, electrical devices are required to work on 120V 60Hz AC, and I haven't heard that this is a major impediment to innovation. Granted, there are minor grumbles from manufacturers about needing several different power supplies, so that 240V AC and 50Hz AC can also be used. But still, how has this stifled innovation?
And note that both the Internet and the Web have standards that are in every sense a "committee" design. In this case, we did hear a lot of grumbling from knowedgeable geeks that both IP/TCP and HTTP/HTML were far from optimal designs. But in fact we don't hear this much from the vendors, who are mostly managed by people who don't have a clue about data packets or text markup. And in fact, both the Internet and the Web have led to a blizzard of innovation from millions of companies, despite their suboptimal committee design nature.
The real problem here is that the legal and political systems are fairly clueless about computer technology, and are likely to totally screw up any decrees with a technical component. Thus, the right solution to the problems caused by Microsoft's obstructionism is a strict separation between "system" and "application" software. Since MS sells an OS, it shouldn't be permitted to sell user-level applications. This would eliminate things like claiming that a browser is tied into the OS, and it would put pressure on the OS people to fully document their APIs. But there's no chance whatsoever that such a separation will ever come about, because nobody in any legislature or court (except Al Gore
In fact, IE is already a good example of how not imposing such a "committee" design causes problems. If MS's claim that IE is tied to the OS are true, then their desire for market control has led to an atrociously bad design of their OS. Of course, the fact that they did quickly supply IE-free versions of Windows showed that they were simply lying. But the fact that they have mostly gotten away with doing this is itself a major block to innovation. It has led to the widespread management support of web sites that only "work" with IE. This not only sabotages the general need for industry standards; it also forces developers not working for MS to waste time trying to make their software work for non-standard browsers for where there is no full documentation.
It's hard to see how this helps innovation, when the really innovative web software such as opera, firefox, safari, icab, konqueror, et al are pushed aside by the general pressure to work only with IE and not worry about the "unpopular" browsers.
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Re:isn't MS already supposed to have unbundled IE? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Can you cite something?
Microsoft was sued by Eolas over a software plug-in patent they owned, and they altered (not broke) the way Flash content behaves in IE. (Basically, they made it so you have to focus the Flash by clicking on it before you could interact with the Flash.) But that was:
1) Not their idea, it was the result of a lawsuit, an
Rehash (Score:5, Insightful)
Great plan (Score:3, Funny)
This is a great idea and all, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I think the latter option is more appealing, but only because we've been doing with with Linux for more than a decade.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
yum install firefox
Re: (Score:3)
The ideal way would be for IE to be a fully add/removable program. Lets say you install a fresh copy of Windows without IE and realize you don't happen to have a Firefox CD (they sell them on the Mozilla store, buy one today!). You go to add/remove programs, add IE just long enough to download Firefox, install Firefox, then go back to add/remove programs and remove IE. Should be simple enough.
Of
That's not quite what they said... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the Opera press release:
Unbundling IE doesn't necessarily mean shipping an OS without a browser. If IE is an optional component, OEMs could still preinstall one browser or another. Even Opera is taking into account the fact that removing IE entirely might not be feasible, and suggesting that the system come with at least one alternative.
I agree that an OS needs to ship with a web browser. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a specific browser except for company policy. Witness Apple replacing IE with Safari, or Red Hat replacing Mozilla with Firefox, etc.
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Re:This is a great idea and all, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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As much as I hate IE (Score:3, Insightful)
De Facto Standard (Score:5, Insightful)
My view ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has forced IE into a "defacto standard". Now every web designer has to write code that works on IE and browsers that are not broken. Often you will see web pages that only work on IE.
Silverlight is the next step. Flash is bad enough but Silverlight will make it even harder to keep the Internet OS neutral.
To solve the no browser issue is real easy. Just provide an Icon for that will download Firefox, IE, Opera, or Safari from the desktop. Let the user decide at runtime.
Of course you will then have to change the HTML help system so it can work with any browser and not just IE.
I am all for requiring IE to follow standards. Not bundling would be great IMHO but I just don't think it is practical.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The good news is someone's finally getting it: they finally want to force MS into standards compliance. That's all that really matters. I don't see the browser application itself (or media player, for that matter) as a monopoly abuse - it's the content that's the abuse. IE/WMP both play proprietary content, using Windows as the vehicle.
Sabotaging Windows' built-in media capabilities only harms consumers. Preventing MS from leveraging those capabilities to push their own proprietary, non-interoperable formats helps them and everyone else.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple bundle Safari, but it's trivial to remove in it's entirety (or simply not install), different linux distributions bundle different browsers and they can always be removed/replaced easily... What windows distributors (ie OEMs) really need is the ability to remove ie completely and replace it with a third party browser, instead of being forced to install the third party browser alongside the buggy outdated one that's built in.
And as for not having a functional browser, there are many many other areas where windows lacks functional apps in comparison to other systems, they don't bundle a functional spreadsheet (or even a facility to view spreadsheets) for instance, nor do they bundle an ssh client/server (everyone else does, and ssh is becoming the standard for remote admin of network devices, replacing telnet), they don't even have a secure erase tool by default and many other shortcomings compared to other systems.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
~90% of users are going to go with whatever browser they're given. Chances are they don't know what a browser is, and won't even know there are other pieces of software that do the same thing. I've met plenty of people using FF who just think it's a different place for the "internet" to live.
Most apps/sites (read: most = retarded) require IE. Most tech support lines require you to use IE (i.e. they'll hang up on you if you say you don't have it, telling you that only IE can be used to solve any problems hovering around ports 80 and 443). Therefore, for an OEM to provide tech support to their customers (a legal requirement) without incurring fees in altering their "help" systems to cater for "user does not have IE" or "user consents to use a different browser than officially mandated one" branches, the people with the purse strings generally see it as their xmas bonuses going up in smoke.
End result? IE is so entrenched it's a practical neccessity, whether it's made optional or not.
And this brings us to the second point, where Opera are right on the money: why is IE so entrenched? Because, for a time, you practically couldn't use chunks of the web without it, and it's pretty much still mandatory on intranets (yay for ActiveX) - ref. browser wars - because MS deliberately subverted the standards. They even tried the same thing with Opera, feeding it malformed stylesheets on MSN [news.com] in order to make opera appear defective, resulting in the semi-famous B0rk! edition.
By forcing MS to produce a browser that follows the open, published standard (as opposed to the limited subset they do currently), all of a sudden we have a level playing field not only for browsers but for web devs as well. MS certainly has the technical nouse to produce a world class browser, but their strategy since Netscape died has been to keep it usable enough that people didn't puke up their own pelvises whilst using it, but make it no better than that. Heck, you think IE7 would have happened without FF? I doubt it. They choose not to because they have a vested interest in keeping as much of the net, and the web, using protocols or applications that they control, either in whole or in part because that makes controlling you, the product, that much easier. If everyone was going around using opera, or flashblock, or google apps, or Macs, we'd have plagues, cats and gods living together, mass hysteria and, dog forbid, drops in MS's mindshare and marketshare which can only leave the fortress gates open for commie pinkos like Linyos Torovoltos, making the problem even worse.
Thankfully, such a proposition has a chance, albeit slim, of happening in Europe - a fully CSS W3C-compliant IE would be a colossal boon for web devs, and ultimately users, the world over, probably eventually to MS's decline, since they'd be forced to compete on features rather that support for the semi-crippled IE-only interwebosphere. Apart from corporates of course, where IE will still rule the roost due to Active Directory (Opera! PLEASE support SPNEGO so those of us in MS shops don't have to chuck our creds in every five minutes! Firefox, PLEASE add MSI support and a GPO snap-in and I can guarantee you five hundred users tomorrow). Not sure it'd fly in America, cos what's good for MS is good for the US is good for the world, right?
Disclaimer: long time Opera fanboy, long time Brit with long time disdain for the US govs foreign and economical policies
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
To some extent, this does/did happen. There was a long period of time during which every computer bought seemed to have musicmatch jukebox (customized, no less) on it. Then, with the deal HP had with Apple, HP computers all came with itunes for a while (do they still?). So why is it such a problem to bundle in another browser if they're bundling in media players?
I don't necessarily frown on microsoft bundling software with their operating system. Really, we can choose to use it or not use it. What I frown on is them bundling broken software (namely IE) that appears to casual users as if it works fine. This creates a situation where users won't move past internet explorer because they don't understand that it's a problem at all. That's what I frown on.
To me, this then means that Opera should not necessarily take this case to court, but instead to the OEMs (like you said). They don't need to unbundle IE or change any of its OS integration. They just need to add in other browsers to show users they exist. They did it with media players, why not with browsers?
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Such a result would FAIRLY penalize Microsoft.
Although I dispute the idea that it would penalize Microsoft at all. It's the
OEM that will get the call when things break. It will be the OEM (not Microsoft)
that bears the responsibility and cost of support.
Those that take the support call should be the ones that get to decide
what is and what is not included.
That's part of being a reseller in ANY OTHER CONTEXT.
He who will get the grief gets the ultimate control.
Microsoft short circuits the market by being a monopoly that can
bully any of it's customers into bending to it's will.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right.
The thing to bear in mind here is that the web browser is not part of the operating system when you take into account what an operating system actually is. The web browser is an application that runs on the operating system; it is not a part of the OS itself. Microsoft may have built IE in this way, but the implementation doesn't necessarily define where the lines are drawn. The availability of a myriad of different web browsers, each of which is fully capable of running on a variety of OSs without being integrated, proves this. Microsoft has gotten away with IE bundling primarily because they claimed it isn't feasible to remove IE from the OS. That is a load of BS, but they fooled the courts once.
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It's not a load of bs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's not a load of bs (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Quite correct. Technically one can consider the entire UI of an OS to be "optional".
I will now point to the myriads of UI fiascos, efforts, flame wars, holy wars, and bottom up redesigns that have gone on in the (GUI) KDE/Gnome/XWin/X.Org projects or the (audio) ALSA/OSS/ESound/aRts/JACK projects.
I am not even going to list out all the various , especially since Wikipedia has them nicely summarized. [wikipedia.org]
Sure all of the above projects had their reasons (most of those reasons well natured, and an few of them devious), but in some cases the sheer amount of rework that has gone on is just pointless. How many times does the wheel need to be reinvented?
Imagine if the various major projects had been coordinated and run efficiently. Maybe Linux would even have had sound working out of the box (out of the torrent?
Just restricting ourselves to browsers for a moment, if all the development effort that has been spent fighting had instead been used to make just one awesome browser, FF 3 would have been released last year, be fully complainant with HTML 5, have its CSS bugs long since worked out, support the entire SVG standard (right now all browsers with SVG support have only partial support). If some of those other projects mentioned above were unified then FF would also have had 100% working audio/video streaming in every format under the sun running on Linux to such an extent as to make Windows and Mac users jealous.
But just in terms of Gecko development, effort has been spent on Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Mozilla, and Firefox, and I'm sure I've forgotten a few as well!
Now think about how much of a hassle it has been to get all the various Linux browser configurations setup to work with all the various sound systems and media players. Streaming video working instead of a web page? Well that may depend on which of the 4 included browsers is being used!
Yes, choice is good. But when it is a matter of 5 choices, none of which do all that needs to be done, then the user is stuck choosing what they "least need to work" want rather than what they want to use, and that is not a good choice to force the user to make.
Any one given approach has its draw backs, a common complaint about FF is that abstracting away the UI (XUL et all) is resource intensive. As everyone who bothered to make a FF "native API spin off" eventually figured out, in 2 years no one really cares anymore and there is not much perf diff between native APIs and XUL.
This is sort of getting off track. Well not really. The final statement was:
Well of course it is technically POSSIBLE. But feasible? Not if you take into consideration the end user experience.
On a more grounded level, I'll note that Microsoft's HTML renderer is used all over the damn place in Windows XP and Vista. Looking at Vista's control panel, it sure as heck looks like nothing more than a fancy HTML page. One could easy argue that putting a thin wrapper on top of a basic OS level component then shoving in Favorites, History, and Cookies is such a minimal effort in comparison to writing an actual HTML renderer (just look above at the slew of Gecko front ends!) that the vast majority of the "web browser" code is fundamental to the end user functionality of the OS.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
The issue I have usually heard from a web-design standpoint is that Internet Explorer is the only pre-installed option on Windows (meaning many people never bother to switch to another browser), is not remotely standards compliant (meaning web designers have to do all kinds of fun workarounds for IE compatibility) and is not open source, so (unlike the Linux and OS X situations) industrious end-users cannot simply go in and fix any HTML/CSS standards compliance bugs in the default-browser-flavor themselves.
That's how I read the Opera suit, though admittedly only one possible interpretation... "either make your browser play nice with the rest of the world, or offer other default browsers that do."
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
My ADSL router (a Netgear DG834G) uses a web interface for its configuration panel. I might have a hard time getting on the internet to download a browser if I don't have a browser to set up my internet connection.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The rules are DIFFERENT when dealing with a monopoly.
Stuff that is perfectly legal, reasonable, and even encouraged in a competitive environment are disallowed in a monopoly.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, there is no rule that says if you are a monopoly your company will be divided up into separate pieces, but they've done that.
Similiarly there is no rule that says if you are monopoly that the government will decide how much you can charge for your product, and when you can raise prices and by how much, but they've done that too.
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Re:Vista (Score:4, Informative)
If you are talking about back end stuff like Windows Update, that's not even done through a web page in Vista anyway. Maybe it uses some IE components in the background but I doubt the Firefox people want to make a module to update Windows anyway and updates to the OS is Microsoft's space anyway - a basic part of the OS. Not sure what else you could be referring to. Web based Help for Windows? Same idea.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Vista (Score:5, Informative)
I have Vista and Opera, and Opera is set as default. If you click a link anywhere in Windows, it launches Opera. For example, if you get an error there is a link to an appropriate KB article on microsoft.com. Clicking this for me launches it in Opera.
The only programs I've found that don't honour the default are Yahoo Messenger and City of Heroes - apparently they prefer to hardcode to launch IE, which is their choice.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what this is? I
Two obvious things: (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they don't. However, KDE, Apple, and even Nintendo, do.
Why? Because Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies have to play by different rules.
Actually, it is, because I can actually uninstall Konqueror. Dolphin is the new default file manager, and nothing else requires Konqueror. I can then set Firefox or Opera as the default browser.
Now, I like Konqueror, so I keep it around, but that is fundamentally different than IE. If Dell wanted to ship Kubuntu machines with Firefox instead of Konqueror, they could do that. But Dell cannot ship Windows machines with Firefox instead of IE, because you cannot remove IE from Windows.
Isn't that a legitimate complaint?
More importantly, IE is the least standards-compliant of any browser, STILL. Isn't it damaging to the Web as a whole to have the most popular browser also be the least compliant? It's precisely because of these people you talk about that I can't simply design a page for standards -- I now have to design it once for the standards (tested in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and Opera), and then add in a ton of hacks to make it work in IE.
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Re:Just shut up already (Score:4, Insightful)
It is fundamentally different for one very good reason:
Microsoft are a convicted monopolist, the vendors using KDE are not. It is illegal for a monopoly to use their market position to leverage other markets, which is exactly what they are doing.
Also, I should point out that I know of no Linux distribution which comes with only one browser.
If Dell and others feel comfortable distributing **Linux**, what makes you think they wouldn't distribute Opera and Firefox if there were a demand for that?
Because there is no financial incentive to do so. They have already paid for IE (since it is bundled as part of the cost of Windows), so shipping another browser instead doesn't save them any money. It is easier for them to just leave the Windows installation as-is rather than having to remove IE (which is easier said than done) and install another browser.
On the other hand, if IE wasn't bundled with the stock distribution the cost to Dell of installing any (free) browser would be the same, giving other browsers an equal footing.
The people that Opera is whining about not having access to, are largely the people who think that Internet Explorer is "The Internet."
By either not bundling IE, or bundling alternatives, these people's awareness would be raised and they might actually try alternatives (and find something that suits them better) rather than assuming IE is "the internet". I see no reason why peoples' ignorance should be used as a reason for perpetuating their ignorance.
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Re:Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
They are leveraging their OS monopoly to dominate the browser market
Are they? I know they *were*. They were doing that by preventing OEMs from including, say, Netscape on machines they sold. To my knowledge, they're not doing that anymore. Are they?
they are using their dominance in the browser market to damage competitors
How are they doing that now (not 10 years ago)? Simply having a product (an OS) that has good features (like a browser) is not unfairly damaging to competitors - that's just outcompeting your competitors. What are they doing now that was found to be illegal anticompetitive behavior last time? Because as I recall just bundling a browser wasn't part of that.
Without the lever, the intentional incompatabilities of IE would make it 3rd choice or drive it into extinction. With the lever, web designers are forced to adapt to the "quirks" instead, producing webpages that work well on IE but not so on other (standards-complient) browsers, which in turn drives more people to IE, creating a lock-in effect.
Seems a little weak to me. Seems to me it would be fairly easy for the Opera devs to get their browser to work with the IE quirks if they were interested in doing so. I realize they're not, but that's not the point. It just doesn't seem all that compelling a reason, to me, to go to a business and say "this is the engineering spec you have to work with by law". Doesn't seem at all reasonable to me. And again, I don't like MS. But remember, just having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. You'd have to prove that MS is using embrace and extend to intentionally make Opera not work. And that might be provable. But even then, best-case scenario is that MS would have to document how IE treats web pages (which I believe is documented now). I can't see the government deciding, by law, what HTTP standard they have to use.
And somewhere along that route, a dozen or so laws have been broken and the only reason MS hasn't been drawn and quartered in the courts is that they move faster than the court system and will probably be bancrupt long before the final, crushing verdict is rendered.
This is certainly true, but I think there are probably other places where MS is causing more problems than the browser "market". Heck, we saw the trial from the Win95 days drag on so long that it was made totally irrelevant by later versions of Windows. But I don't think that's at issue here. To me, this is kind of like the North trying to re-fight the Civil War - the issues are now largely irrelevant and we already won. MS lost. Like I said, unless they're still pressuring the OEMs....
To me, the bigger issue is that these days almost any browser is "good enough" and free, so people will use whatever comes with their machine. That's not a matter of anticompetitive practices, it's a matter of consumer apathy. As such, Opera should focus more on OEMs than trying to sue their competition.
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