Google To Microsoft — Give Users Choices In Vista

An anonymous reader writes "A Google spokesman has asked Microsoft to 'preserve user choice for search and other applications' with its future products, such as Vista. The spokesman made this comment after meeting with European Union antitrust regulators, though he added that at this point, the company has no plans to make antitrust allegations against Redmond. Notably, McAfee and Symantec have accused Microsoft of not being forthcoming with the code they need to ensure their security wares run smoothly on Vista, and the EU has already expressed concern about Microsoft's potentially anticompetitive plans."

sure

[illuminatedwax]

Sure, they'll do it just as soon as Firefox stops choosing Google by default.

Re:I'd care more if...

[orielbean]

Here is a question for the knowledgeable - which of the AV products (free and otherwise) are the BEST for resources and still competent at catching problems?

Is Trend the smallest footprint? I would love some answers from the people here.

IE7 preserves search settings; what about Safari?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I don't know what happens when upgrading to Vista, but upgrading to IE7 does preserve the search settings. When I upgraded to IE7, Yahoo was set as the default search engine (because I had installed Yahoo toolbar in the past), not Live.

Secondly, Google has some nerve demanding that Microsoft give users a choice regarding search engines when they have a deal with Apple that makes Google not only the default, but the exclusive search engine for Safari, which is Mac OSX's default browser, and one that holds a monopoly-like share wrt browser usage in Mac OS X. Not only can the user not change the default search engine in Safari, but the user can't even add any secondary search engines.

Re:No sympathy for McAfee and Symantec

[ThinkFr33ly]

I think you need to look more carefully at what's going on here. It's not that MS is offering an AV product (fine), it's that it will use kernel hooks that are simply not available to other competitors. I think Symantec et al are clever enough to rewrite for Vista, assuming they're not literally locked out. That's what MS is apparantly doing, and that's a problem.

Actually, that's not what's happening at all. Microsoft OneCare NOT using any kernel hooks. It is using the EXACT same APIs available to all of Microsoft's competitors. Anybody who tells you any different is just spreading FUD.

Several other anti-virus companies have come out in support of Microsoft, and have actually released beta versions of their suites that work just fine on Vista.

The fact of the matter is that Symantec and McAfee don't want to invest the time and money into re-writing their existing applications that rely on all these kernel hooks, which, by the way, were NEVER supported to begin with. They see a great opportunity to do some good old fashion MS-bashing and FUD spreading in an attempt to get Microsoft to give up on one of the most important security improvements in Windows... um... ever.