The European Union is making me very, very angry. As you may know, the guys who make Opera filed a complaint saying that Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer with windows is an antitrust violation. Now Microsoft is forgoing a hearing in which they were going to defend themselves; they’re almost certainly going to lose this case, which is absurd. Not only do the facts contradict Opera’s claim, but a ruling stating that Microsoft is in fact at odds with the antitrust code would only serve to turn the browser world into a complicated nightmare.
Internet Explorer has only been doing worse and worse recently. Europe should know this best, as Firefox 3 is the most popular browser there. And public perception of IE as of late has been pretty bad. Personal users still using Microsoft’s age-old browser are usually seen as uneducated users or corporate drones.
And saying that IE cannot be the only browser that comes with Windows creates far more problems than it solves. There are two possible routes that could come from a ruling against Microsoft. The first is that every version of Windows has to include every browser ever. That means Interent Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla (the other browser the Firefox guys make), Safari, Opera, Chrome, Netscape, and everything else. Every single developer out there would be able to make a case saying that it is an antitrust violation for his software to not be included. Ridiculous. The other possibility is that Microsoft does not include any browser. That’s a terrible idea as pretty much everyone uses IE to download the browser they actually want. This puts us back to the days where you had to go to the store and pay $10 for ten megabytes of software.
Hopefully the EU will get its act together and let Microsoft off the hook. I know the EU won’t care about this, but Microsoft had a trial about this already here in the States, and we still have Internet Explorer in our Windows. At the end of the day, methinks Opera is just throwing a tantrum. It’s not like Mozilla brought up the suit.
