Opera Tells EU That Microsoft's IE Hurts the Web 338
kastababy writes "In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Update: 12/14 19:47 GMT by Z : We also discussed this yesterday.
Dupe? (Score:4, Informative)
This is just sad.
Re:Decoupling IE and Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
That's where the OEM comes in. Decouple IE from Windows, and the OEM is free to install IE, Firefox, Opera, whatever.
Re:Opera (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Waaambulance (Score:5, Informative)
You are aware that Microsoft is a member of the W3C [w3.org], right? And that they contributed to the development of such standards as CSS2? And that Microsoft pledged to support these standards back in 1998, and yet somehow their competitors support considerably more parts of that spec than they do? (I suspect ceasing all development other than security fixes for 3-4 years had quite a bit to do with that.)
A bunch of companies didn't get together and say, "We don't like how Microsoft does the web, let's design another one." A bunch of companies including Microsoft got together and said, "Here's how we're going to design the web," Microsoft signed off on it, and then went off in their own direction.
Work to Change it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Problem in Accepting Standards (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. And it's marked as fixed. Firefox 3 will finally have this. You can check out the beta if you want.
Re:Been a while since I've heard of "Opera"... (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's more a case of Opera being pissed that it's not funded with Google money like Mozilla Firefox is.
Wait, so Opera is pissed at Google and Firefox, so their solution is to sue Microsoft? Oh, yeah, and who said Opera doesn't take money from Google?
If "developers" are going to "fight", how about developing something the market cares about instead, eh?
Maybe they'll appeal to the market once the market is actually choosing the best browser instead of having IE forced on it?
Opera is my favourite, but like a woman it has ... (Score:2, Informative)
I run Opera 9.24 (int) and Firefox 2.0.0.1 (de)
Opera_int (6.3 MB)
Firefox_de (5.7 MB)
1.) ODD
- Opera is very slow handling
ebay.de/.com
reichelt.de (radioshackalike)
pages, for these pages I use Firefox.
- not OpenSource
2.) Beauty
- win32/bsd/linux
- Email Client (IMAP/POP3)
- Addressbook
- lightweight
- can close all tabs (beautifull and slick)
- restores sessions faster than firefox
- Wand (Password manager) == awesome
- speeddial
- Bookmarkmanager, it's a mighty tool in contrast to FF
- abook/bookmark/mail export/import function == very good
- Widgets (addons)
- uses Mozilla Pluggins
These features are built in, and must not be installed manually,
like you would do with Plugginfox.
Well and as you can think this post was written within Opera/win2k
here comes my advise
Just try it out, and judge.
Re:Waaambulance (Score:4, Informative)
No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.
Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments [microsoft.com] as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."
Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.
Re:Waaambulance (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep IE closed source so that they can continue to use it strategically to throw a wrench into the standards. As long as stuff doesn't quite work right on IE and IE is the majority browser Microsoft can continue to stall and delay anything that challenges their dominance.
Re:Been a while since I've heard of "Opera"... (Score:3, Informative)
You're just pissed that few people care which browser they use.
No, I'm pissed that because of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, web developers have to spend 5x more time and effort than they should because they can't code to the W3C standards for HTML and CSS. I'm pissed that because of this, many lazy web developers have chosen to only support the one major browser that doesn't conform to standards, which means I can't necessarily use the browser I want.
I'm pissed because Microsoft is purposefully trying to make sure I can't use the browser I want to use. For years, using a browser that conformed to standards meant that pages rendered incorrectly or didn't function at all. This was largely due to Microsoft, and it was on purpose. Sometimes this was the case on major sites, which meant that people could not use any browser other than IE and expect to be able to use the internet. Even still, Microsoft won't build its own sites according to standards. If you visit their knowledge base in any browser other than IE, it will cut off articles prematurely. If you visit an OWA site in anything other than IE, you don't get the real version of their web app. Microsoft was even caught putting extra code into MSN.com just so that it wouldn't render in Opera.
Face it, Microsoft has been systematic about subverting web standards in the hopes of forcing people to use their OS, their browser, and their websites. They do it in order to restrict the freedom of the market to choose anything other than their products. Because they have a monopoly and are able to overpower market forces, government intervention is probably required.