Action against abuse of monopoly [LWN.net]

Action against abuse of monopoly

Posted Jan 2, 2013 16:18 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341)
In reply to: Secure Boot, No Thanks by efraim
Parent article: The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs

Except the US didn't actually stop MS from shipping IE. And look at the actual remedy imposed by the EU: customers are presented with a browser selection dialog at first boot which allows them to choose from a list of top browsers. If they select a non-IE option then they're sent to download that, but it doesn't remove all IE components from the system, merely selects a default.

Yes this is an extra imposition if you're happy to use MS's default browser, but it's hardly a particularly onerous one. In return the consumer benefits as one company fails to snuff out all competition in the browser market. Look at the performance benefits to us all when healthy competition returned to the browser market; MS had to start investing in browser development again -- something they entirely stopped doing during the period they had a practical browser monopoly.

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Action against abuse of monopoly

Posted Jan 3, 2013 20:17 UTC (Thu) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]

I actually don't believe for a moment that the resurgence in IE development we've witnessed has anything to do with EU's efforts.

I think it's unfair to the hard work of Mozilla and later Google Chrome development teams to claim that their achievement is actually a result of some cheap political posturing by EU. What actually made Microsoft develop IE again is the fact that Mozilla has succeeded in delivering a more stable and feature-rich (and easy to use!) web browser for several years. In fact I am afraid that this trend might be reversed now that Mozilla started chasing Chrome in version treadmill. (I have only anecdotal evidence but it seems that plugin compatibility and stability suffered as a result)