Understatement

In this case we're talking about a company that has repeatedly proven that they'll use that leverage, including in ways that are illegal (in the view of U.S. anti-trust laws, at least).

Unfortunately it's not clear that Mozilla will be sufficiently compelling to stem the tide. If AOL (Time-Warner) follows through on their rumored plans to make Mozilla or Netscape the primary/default browser for their customers; if they add compelling features to the browser support (XML-based web services) that generate user demand and convince lots of users to switch back to (at least part-time) to Navigator/Mozilla from IE ... if they do that it will break apart the newly forming hegemony.

If Apple includes Mozilla or Navigator in their base MacOS X (possibly along with MS IE) it may help.

Naturally increasing use of Linux on the desktop (especially by schools, and governments) will help. While many people discounted the growth of Linux on the desktop a few short years ago; the trends are clearly leading in that direction --- especially for international markets.

It may sound trite to say it, but the recent 1.0 milestone that has been reached by Mozilla is just the beginning of the struggle to regain diversity among web browsers. That struggle is crucial to protecting the open nature of the web.

As much as I hate to legislate these things; it would seem reasonable to require that Microsoft make their browsers support a baseline of protocol and file format conformance (in their browsers, for HTTP and HTML) and that they be required to make that (with no extensions) the default. Perhaps it would be appropriate to require that users specifically enable the Microsoft proprietary extensions in their browsers. In this regard we'd be subjecting MS to a double standard, which would only be justified by their convinction in the anti-trust case. We'd effectively be saying: "Since YOU have used these techniques illegally before, YOU are forbidden from carrying these tools/weapons around for this period of time."

While that's a nice theory, we can predict the response. First, MS would decry this as a constraint on their "freedom to innovate" (as if adding a single dialog box that asks the users if they want these "extra" and NON-STANDARD features enabled would be a real constraint). Then they'd restructure the application so that the "conformant" mode would be slow, ugly and practically unusable and have it ask, with practically every click and keypress, to enable the "extensions" (which, they'd naturally make an ALL-OR-NOTHING toggle). In other words they'd punish anyone who didn't accept their embrace-extend-extinguish features just as they do for people who have the audacity to send TEXT e-mail from Outlook. Ultimately I doubt it would be worth the effort to legislate this behavior; it would probably be counter-productive since MS could make it so obviously ineffective but could claim grievous punitive injury and thus negotiate less real remedial injunction.

Funny, that's not consonant with what *I've* seen...