Opera Files EU Complaint Against Microsoft 455
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?
I don't get it (Score:1, Insightful)
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.Rehash (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great idea and all, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Name one OS that doesn't bundle a web browser? Some bundle several, but to my knowledge, proprietary and semi proprietary usually bundle their own browser, and no other.
Of course, getting MS to make their browser follow standards better is definetly a good thing. It's not that bad getting things to work well in IE and most others (in my experience), but at the same time, it shouldn't require much effort either.
And there are a few things that don't work well between any two browsers, IE not being the only player on the block with it's quirks and oddities.
Likely to succeed (Score:2, Insightful)
IANAL, but I think Opera might win this war. Netscape lost a similar battle, but they couldn't leverage the power of EU like Opera can. The EU is also likely to be biased towards Opera because it's a European company (although it is Norwegian, and Norway is not a member of the EU).
On the other hand: the precedence from the media player debacle points to a possible "solution" (forcing Microsoft to release a special version without IE) which in practice means a loss to Opera. The potential buyer of such a product does not exist: He needs to be both knowledgeable about Opera and not knowledgeable enough to know how to install Opera himself.
As much as I hate IE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
And no, IE is not "core" to the OS, nor should it be. The OS is just the kernel and drivers. It's the desktop that is the GUI [explorer.exe], and tray and all that stuff.
It's most likely a better solution to unbundle IE and WMP [among other things] from the install media and let users choose which they want during install. Chances are if you're going to decide which browser to use, you probably have net access. Why would it be so hard to have a "choose a browser, firefox, ie, opera, 'other'" during the install?
As for the "following standards," that's harder to enforce. They're not legally obligated to follow shit all, they're just not allowed to abuse their market position. if they gave the users a choice to use other tools during the install then I think that would remedy the problem.
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.
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.
Pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
I dislike MS's monopolistic practices as much as anyone. But really, there's not much harm in bundling an OS with a browser IF they don't prevent OEMs from including other browsers or from removing the IE icon from the desktop.
Even if MS were forced to include some other browser along with IE, that probably wouldn't help Opera. Unless, of course, their actual goal is to simply force MS to bundle *their* browser. And that would seem to be a fairly ridiculous demand.
De Facto Standard (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what this is? It's jealousy, and it's greed. It's not ethical. It's not reasonable. And I am saying this despite the fact that I don't even like Microsoft all that much.
But people who support this bullshit, they are even worse than MS. I couldn't even begin to imagine what Microsoft would be like if it was run by people like this. You think Microsoft is bad now? ROFL.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand the complaint, but I'm not sure that it's a problem that most computer users care about. The population here on slashdot is a bit different, but most slashdot users know they can get alternative browsers, what the relative strengths and weaknesses are, and have an opinion on which they use and when.
The average computer user given the option to install a different browser during installation (or, considering the population, first boot on a Dell/HP/whatever) isn't going to know about those things, or probably care, but is going to want to stick with what they know or have used before. Those users want to know that it will work with their favorite websites and that they'll be able to find the favorites, history, preferences, etc. Why confuse them? As has been pointed out, it's pretty easy for a user (one that cares) to find a new browser and set it to the default browser and ignore the fact that IE is even installed.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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.
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.
Re:Good PR for Opera (Score:0, Insightful)
People care more about familiarity than some aritrary (in their eyes) standards. IE is familiar, and Opera has some wierd UI conventions when you are coming from a Windows perspective. Let's not forget, that as of about a year or so ago, Opera had to be paid for unless you wanted to endure some silly ad banner. Opera is a very good browser, but if it were really *that* much better more people would use it. I know it's a good browser, yet I use Firefox. I just don't like using Opera.
We, as web developers care immensely about web standards (or, we should), just as road engineers probably care immensely about grades of asphalt. Why, I'd bet there's some standards body akin to the w3c that sets forth standards for asphalt (let's call them the ASS, or the Asphalt Standards Society). However, it would be absurd for them to start doing PSAs to encourage people to drive only on ASS certified roads. Why? Because who the hell cares about the asphalt they drive on? If it's safe and doesn't kill too many people, then nobody really gives a crap.
Informing people about the Acid2 test would elicit a whole lot of "Nice. Who cares?" If Opera is going to compete, it won't be by informing people about its standards adherence.
I'm not sure this case is a good thing at all (Score:2, Insightful)
It's also a way to point out to the uninformed masses that Opera is the only browser for Windows right now that passes the Acid2 test.
And apart from a relatively small number of people who develop web sites, no-one cares, because many of the technicalities in Acid2 are more about what your browser does with bad data it should never get in the first place from a well-designed web site. However, many people care that right now IE displays, say, their bank's web site properly while $SOME_ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER does not.
I would be very disturbed if the standards element of the lawsuit (assuming the summary given is accurate) gets anywhere. That would imply that the recommendation of a group of unelected people in a self-appointed standards body can legally compel an organisation with 80+% market share to change anything about how its wildly successful product works to benefit inferior (according to the market) competitors. What legal or ethical basis is there for such compulsion?
Challenging potential monopoly abuse and market distortion is reasonable. Complaining about a successful business not choosing to follow the recommendations of anyone much less successful's document for anything is a very dangerous path to tread.
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.
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
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:I'm not sure this case is a good thing at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that, the only places where they differ from the standards significantly for for adding new functionality from scratch that there are no specs for, for example ActiveX support. ActiveX turned out to be a terrible idea, of course, but at least it was implemented in IE in a compatible fashion. (So that browsers that don't understand it will just filter it out using the default HTML rules.)
That's not to say Microsoft is entirely guilt-free in any sense, but I don't think they're nearly the malicious monster Slashdot makes them out to be. And, damnit, I think IE's interpretation of how the box model works makes a *hell* of a lot more sense than the CSS standard one. (If I say I want the box to be 40 pixels wide, make it 40 pixels wide damnit!!)