Sometimes the EU regulators seem to have such forward thinking and great ideas. I don't feel this is one of those times. A browser selection screen as a legal requirement, as well as the decision that they have to offer Windows without Media Player installed, seem to me to just be ridiculous requirements levied on Microsoft in an age where these decisions are increasingly irrelevant. There's no browser selection screen required for Windows RT or Windows Phone. Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros, Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the majority of those platforms require you to use the built-in browser, something Microsoft has never done with IE on the desktop. There's always been the choice of what software you want to install, up to the point when mobile devices gained popularity.
What the EU is trying to do is make competition more fair. What they're doing, in effect, seems to be making sure Microsoft has all the disadvantages the legislators can legally throw at them. I worked at a company that did this for employees it wanted to fire, making new requirements that couldn't possibly be met and when the employee failed they were fired for not meeting them. It's obvious the EU wants to fire Microsoft, in an age where competition has never been so fierce (and not due to a browser ballot).
They were found using monopolistic tactics to crush Netscape Navigator. Bill Gates et al were the decision makers. The web browser and Internet are a threat to closed proprietary operating systems like Windows and iOS where applications run exclusively rather than cross platform. Windows used to be where most all applications run. Apple iOS now has the same situation and you will notice Apple less and less happy to help applications run in a web browser and will continue to update Safari iOS less. But it was Microsoft that was found guilty in court for monopolistic anticompetitive actions.
I think it's funny now that if you sell an operating system where you want to talk about number of apps on your OS how important it is those apps cannot run on another system. The low hanging fruit of apps that can easily be written as a web app run on every operating system thus giving no advantage to a proprietary operating system and really enable smaller indie developers.
Microsoft is paying for its past sins, Apple is locking you up and being anticompetitive now, Google is ad spamming you, and I guess Facebook.
Everybody is trying to make a buck. Sometimes the DoJ gets involved. See Microsofts recent efforts to get DoJ after Google :)
> Apple iOS now has the same situation and you will notice Apple less and less happy to help applications run in a web browser and will continue to update Safari iOS less.
The problem wasn't that you didn't have a choice on Windows - you did.
The problem was that by having a near monopoly on Windows, Microsoft gained an unfair (in the eyes of the EU) influence over the whole browser market, not just for their OS.
The result were the dreaded "Optimized for IE" websites, since webmasters had no incentive to cross-test across browsers, and this made the life of the competition much harder.
The same problem doesn't pose (for now) on mthe mobile space, since there are multiple different browsers competing - even if in different OSs each - which means the web devs are forced to remain more or less on spec.
>The same problem doesn't pose (for now) on mthe mobile space, since there are multiple different browsers competing - even if in different OSs each - which means the web devs are forced to remain more or less on spec.
> Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros, Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the majority of those platforms require you to use the built-in browser
Erm. iOS and ChromeOS require you to use the built in browser. In the Chrome case, there's a reasonable reason for that. None of the others you mention have that.
You are not required to user either browser, and for example you can easily set the default browser on Android to Firefox.
On iOS you must use the system provided webkit as other apps aren't allowed to download and execute code. Alternate browsers do exist, but these are based on UIWebView and don't perform as well as Safari.
iOS, ChromeOS, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all require you to use the default browser. I mentioned the Windows platforms in the prior sentence, the two Windows platforms not affected by this ruling.
Actually this is not true on windows phone 8 and windows RT. The only requirement is that you use the native API which means the browser back end will need to be ported to it.
iOS requires you to have the built-in browser installed; they don't require you to use it. (You can download and install Chrome for iOS, but you can never remove Safari.)
Still, this isn't a monopolistic concern until iOS has a monopoly. iOS's marketshare is nowhere near Windows' was when the anti-trust regulations were enacted.
I can't speak for the others but at least Android allows you to use any web browser you want (for example Firefox, Opera, Chrome). And it does give you a "browser selection screen" when you have multiple browsers installed AND open a link.
Windows never stopped anyone from installing an alternative browser either, or from picking a different default browser; the latter point is more of a usability point really (selection screen for every action or pre-set browser setting).
Microsoft got the fine and was required to put this thing up (as it did with WMP) because IE was installed by default (Opera cried it was unfair competition, as Real did for WMP; neither benefited significantly from their complaints iirc, while MS had to bleed for them) and, technically, because it was so integrated with the OS you couldn't uninstall it.
I honestly don't get why Microsoft / Windows is still the only party that has to do this, or why Microsoft himself hasn't struck back by having the EU put the same requirements on OSX and Linux. Then again, IE isn't available for OSX/Linux, so Microsoft wouldn't have anything to gain (unlike Opera / Real, that could compete with IE / WMP).
> I honestly don't get why Microsoft / Windows is still the only party that has to do this
because Microsoft has (had) a natural monopoly position on desktop OS and was found to abuse this monopoly to distort related markets (web browsers)
> why Microsoft himself hasn't struck back by having the EU put the same requirements on OSX and Linux
Because the requirement is applied on "dominant position" grounds. Neither OSX nor Linux have ever reached anything close to a dominant position, let alone abused it.
I agree it isn't fair and I hope that, when Microsoft Windows no longer has monopoly status in the desktop OS market, these onerous regulations are rescinded.
They still have a monopoly. Or do you consider 80%+ share[1] to be non-monopoly level of control? The latest interpretations of the Sherman Act [2] still think this level of control is a clear monopoly.
Which is what they were doing in the browser case right?
And yes, I do think Windows is still a monopoly. I think its days as such are numbered and I think that is a good thing not just for the PC space but for Microsoft as well (in the long term, at least). But for now, yes, with market share north of 90% they still most definitely qualify as a monopoly.
Opera Mini does not run on Webkit. It's a rather special case as it does all rendering on a remote server, the client essentially just lays out an image.
Monopoly is not a requirement of anti-trust. Anti-trust can be non-competitive behavior. The fact that Apple has not been brought on any kind of anti-trust charges is pretty messed up.
For a single company, you need at least a "dominant position", the other anti-trust triggers are company mergers and cartels (inter-company agreements distorting the market). Apple has not been brought on any anti-trust charges because there's no anti-trust charges which will stick to a single non-dominant (marketshare-wise) player.
I'm sure this will go off topic fairly quickly but the fine is for not complying (between 02/2011 and 07/2012) with an order to display a browser selection screen during system setup.
Microsoft may make the best browser but our IT will see to it that it always behaves like IE6.
IE gets a bad rep -- and it is mainly because most of us working for big cos are forced to use the most extremely locked down version of IE at work. These versions are created by IT drones for other drones and their policies are designed to cover their asses during audit. The only purpose of a corporate locked down IE is to serve you intranet pages or access sharepoint. So when a drone like me gets home and fires up his laptop, its always anything but IE.
So now we know why Sinofsky was shown the door after the release of Windows 8. It wasn't a petty power struggle, it was a 3/4 billion dollar fuckup and he was responsible.
Well not I am wondering was it a real mistake, or did the company decide they'd rather pay what ever fine if it means they get to delay presenting any other browser for as long as possible?
I find it implausible that IE earned Microsoft half a billion euros in net revenue over the course of 18 months. It has been many years since bundling IE with Windows has provided a strategic business advantage - making IE the default simply streamlines their support costs by avoiding the finger pointing that occurs between browser vendors and Redmond when something doesn't work quite right...such as security.
The following sentence leaped out at me. The latest version of Internet Explorer is considered to be on a par with its rivals. Really? Considered by whom?
IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on, but from a development standpoint I'm having to make essentially zero IE-specific hacks/fixes in those versions.
So they support the set of features that you want to use.
But in http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html they are still dead last. And you sometimes need to jump through special hoops to get that level of compatibility - for instance without a custom http header you can't get compatibility mode for intranet sites. IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode. (Often jokingly called "porn mode".) And, as you note, competitors like Webkit are rapidly moving the bar for the future.
In no way is this "on par with". "No longer horribly unacceptable compared to" I could grant you. But not "on par with".
> IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on
IE9 is missing a lot of neat stuff which others have had for quite some time (limited CORS or D&D, no text-shadow, offline apps, transitions, placeholders, gradients, animations, xhr2, classlist, History API, typed arrays, async scripts, strict mode, webworkers, file & filereader API, 3D transforms, websockets, flexbox, requestAnimationFrame, datalist, page visibility, forms 2, ...)
IE10 is significantly better, but still behind (mostly due to no webgl and fullscreen)
IE 10 is decent. But, unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn't leaned its lesson and has no plans to support WebGL. This just means IE will trail behind once again.
Microsoft failed to comply with a requirement of a legal settlement, so they are obligated to pay the fine. I doubt anyone here has reservations with that point because it's simply an artifact of the rule of law.
However, the reason several of us find this news disturbing is that we found the original judgment disturbing and the fine reminds that the judgment's settlement requirements are still in play even though, with every passing day, they become more anachronistic. A reminder of a slow-moving government interfering with and not understanding technology to the point of actually damaging technology in the long-term.
The market and technological evolution meted justice to Microsoft in a purer form: loss of market share via improved competition.
I am a fan of Mozilla (by which I mean the lineage of Netscape and Mozilla). I had deeply mixed feelings when the US Department of Justice went after Microsoft for attempting to coerce Windows users into also using Internet Explorer. They made it especially easy to use Internet Explorer, sure. They encouraged naive users to think "Internet Explorer" simply was the Internet, sure. But they never once prohibited me from installing Netscape, Mozilla Suite, or Firefox.
Moreover, they never prohibited me from encouraging friends and family to do the same. If those friends and family rejected my recommendation it wasn't because Microsoft was being anti-competitive; it was because at the time Mozilla was genuinely not-so-great. It was my preference but not everyone's. Still, I considered it my duty, in a manner of speaking, to support Mozilla at all costs because Microsoft was evil.
Yes, I considered Microsoft to be an "evil" (using the word in a very lightweight way) actor in the market. I didn't like how Mozilla was being treated. But on the other hand, I don't feel that anything they did should be considered illegal. If I recall, the only thing I found especially distasteful was how difficult they made it to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the Windows desktop. Like "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer," it required a bit more force.
I also didn't like how even after I installed Mozilla, IE would come up in odd places like applications' help files. So I couldn't outright uninstall it. But flipped around, and reviewed with a modern eye, they were incorporating HTML rendering into non-browsing contexts well before most of us decided that, yeah, HTML is probably a decent platform for rendering styled text in a variety of contexts. Might as well embed an HTML rendering control. We just didn't like that it was IE's Trident (or whatever it was called back then). We wanted it to be Gecko, or later Webkit.
I am convinced that Microsoft slowed down and all but paused their browser development effort with IE 6 at least in part thanks to the legal pressures they were facing from the US and EU. I know that had I been at the Microsoft helm, I'd consider the web browser somewhat tainted and would try to focus engineering and sales efforts somewhere else where my organization wasn't feeling as much government heat, deserved or otherwise.
Years later, I think, they decided to test the waters again, slowly at first. Eventually they awakened to the fact that Internet Explorer had been completely eclipsed during that time, and it has taken them years to catch up. Some would argue that IE 10 is only today roughly at feature parity with its competition.
When you and I bad-mouth Internet Explorer 6, I recommend we direct at least a portion of our vitriol at the DOJ and EU. If I am right that Microsoft's seizing up of browser development was motivated even in part by their legal troubles, then the DOJ and EU are partially and indirectly responsible for the IE 6 malaise. Government meddling, I believe, actually made the situation worse for us.
But the EU insists on continuing to meddle, to continue punishing Microsoft even though the rest of the market looks on and laughs.
When people say, "why aren't they going after Apple for iOS?" I hope they are being rhetorical. That would be awful. The DOJ and EU should not go after either organization. When one perceives monopoly, it's important to be as serious and objective as possible: is it possible that the preferred product is actually the best for customers, even if for reasons we don't agree with, such as ease of use? Allow the market to sort itself out. The market is doing really quite well without the meddling--at least among those who have avoided it--so, thank you, but no thank you.
Without the legal pressure, the status quo would have remained, websites would still be optimized for quirks in how Explorer renders HTML (unless the developers were passionate enough about openness to spend the extra effort to work correctly for all browsers), and there wouldn't have been much incentive to improve Gecko or Webkit because Microsoft could just introduce incompatibilities into its rendering that would cause compliant websites to break other renderers.
In an imaginary world where Android doesn't exist and iOS dominates the mobile world in the same way that windows dominated the desktop, I would hope that authorities would constrain them to prevent a similar scenario from happening with mobile browsing and apps. At a certain level of market share, these things become equivalent to natural monopolies such as electric power utilities and fixed-line telecom where providers would be able to economically bar new market entrants and then abuse customers at their leisure unless regulated.
So, this might be a stupid question, but I'm curious: Where does the money of the fine actually go? It's just being collected by these EU regulators and sits in their bank accounts?
>In February 2009 64% of all desktop computers used Internet Explorer, according to data compiled by StatCounter, a web traffic analysis company.Four years on, that share is only 30%
StatCounter measures pageviews, not "desktop computers", so that statement is flat out wrong and extremely misleading.
NetMarketShare measures computers, and IE has around 55% marketshare not 30%.
I think the criticism was that the number from the metric was given the wrong unit (percentage of pageviews vs. percentage of desktop computers), rather than that the metric itself is fuzzy.
Of course such things are educated guesses and have sampling bias, but they aren't even trying to measure the same thing.
This is from an earlier comment:
One big difference is that NetMarketShare tries to measure unique clients, while StatCounter measures web page hits.
Since the power users browse (probably a magnitude of order) more web pages than the normal users, Chrome and Firefox is overrepresented in power users who browse a ton.
Toothpaste marketshare analogy. It's possible that 70% of people use Colgate and 30% use Crest, but Colgate sales by volume are only 40% vs. 60% for Crest, since Crest users tend to brush more daily and use more of the toothpaste when they do for some reason.
Or a car analogy: if Toyota sells 40% of cars and Honda only 30%, but 60% of miles driven on roads are by Honda cars since they use it more. Which has a higher marketshare?
I've seen countless "bugs" in Internet Explorer and the documentation in their developer knowledge base was always to "upgrade browser" or "use this vbscript snippet" or "use this jscript only solution that would cause errors in non IE browsers".
At some point I got seriously annoyed by them. This fine is a good reminder that there is some justice in this world.
What the EU is trying to do is make competition more fair. What they're doing, in effect, seems to be making sure Microsoft has all the disadvantages the legislators can legally throw at them. I worked at a company that did this for employees it wanted to fire, making new requirements that couldn't possibly be met and when the employee failed they were fired for not meeting them. It's obvious the EU wants to fire Microsoft, in an age where competition has never been so fierce (and not due to a browser ballot).