Re:Antitrust (Score 1)

You don't consider products, only markets.

At some point you have to boil things down to something concrete, AKA a product in particular that is in violation. So yes, it is products. If there were no products there would be no market? comprende?

The courts were not fooled, they were just castrated before they could do anything about it when Bush was elected using MS's campaign contributions.

hahahhahahahahahahaha, the second you said Bush you shot yourself in the foot, what on god's green Earth does Bush have to do with the success of Microsoft Windows. Jesus Christ people have officially gone off the deep end.

Not so. The developers of both are paid. You pay for IE every time you buy a computer that has Windows bundled with it. It is not itemized so that you know how much of your money goes to that, but you've paid nonetheless. Worse, even if you plan to only use Firefox, you already paid for IE and there is no way out of it if you're trapped on the Windows monopoly

You could say that about any .exe that is installed with Windows. I paid for notepad.exe and calc.exe but I really wanted to use emacs! Of course you pay for things that come on the system. You aren't "trapped on the monopoly", what you do is visit getfirefox.com and click a single link and you can log onto slashdot in firefox and complain about how much it irks you that you had to use IE once while you installed firefox. Other users on this thread have already mentioned this same scenario, but you have failed to acknowledge it, most likely because it isn't convenient for hating on Microsoft. If I buy an Apple I'm forced to use Safari just as much as I'm forced to use IE on Windows, is that not true?

Have you done Web development? Billions are spent every year working around MS's failure to properly implement standards. People are coding to 8 year old standards, because MS stopped adding functional support for new standards.

After reading your comment it makes me wonder if YOU have done any web development. I concede to the fact that Microsoft doesn't irresponsibly throw in unproven code into their architecture. Microsoft has customers, Firefox has users. Microsoft introduced the technology behind AJAX, so I guess they are stagnating the industry huh? Good things come from proprietary features.

Even IE7 completely fails to implement any real XHTML and misses half of CSS2

Completely fails at real xhtml? By that I'm assuming you mean it uses the tag soup parser, which might be true, but I would hardly constitute that as a "complete failure" because the browser does accomplish its job, which is to deliver web content to 700 million windows users. "Half of css2" is completely false information. It implements almost all of css2, obviously you have been reading the completely bias and botched analysis over at webdevout. Not to mention the fact that some of the "bugs" in their implementation are not bugs, but simply difference of opinions about what the expected behavior should be. The technical problems with IE go beyond what you seem to think is Microsoft intentionally stagnating the industry, there are very serious issues that come into play with a 700 million user base that are just not there with less mature applications and platforms such as firefox or safari. Give their user base and APIs time to mature and they will be in exactly the same boat.

And for the record, yes I have done tons of coding with all of the object models so please don't even attempt to insult my intelligence with regard to the technology.

The coders at Opera created a better browser than IE6 and maintained it that way for years

Marginally better? Ever heard of cost/benefit? If something is better, that doesn't necessarily warrant a switch. There is a cost associated with switching, a cost that obviously didn't yield any reasonable and practical gain from the users. It's really as simple as that.