Opera Sees "Dramatic" Rise From Microsoft's Ballot 378
TheReal_sabret00the notes a TechRadar piece reporting that Opera Software has seen a doubling from normal download numbers on average since Microsoft's browser-choice screen lit up in Europe. The UK saw an 85% increase and for other countries it was larger still: Poland 328%, Spain 215%, and Italy 202%. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, said "A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse."
an anti-swpat company doing well (Score:5, Informative)
Opera Software [swpat.org] did great work lobbying against software patents in the campaigns on the EU software patents directive [swpat.org]. Thanks Opera!.
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Re:an anti-swpat company doing well (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are expressions of ideas, more like mathematical proofs than real, mechanical, inventions - and neither ideas nor mathematical theories are patentable. The "expressions of ideas" bit is why programmes are copyrightable -- as literary works. And if they're literary works, protected by copyright, how can the be patentable too?
And remember, in Europe you can't patent business methods or processes, either.
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Because they are expressions of ideas, more like mathematical proofs than real, mechanical, inventions - and neither ideas nor mathematical theories are patentable.
While I'm generally against software patents, this does bother me somewhat. If you come up with an amazing algorithm - which is really just math - to do something, for example, like RSA, why shouldn't you be able to patent the process? An algorithm can be very real in the sense that it takes input (like a machine) runs some process (like a mach
Re:an anti-swpat company doing well (Score:4, Informative)
"It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, whatever belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.
"It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1813
Re:an anti-swpat company doing well (Score:4, Informative)
That describes... guess what?
Patents!
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I'm sorry, but I think you'll find I've patented the notion of not buying the "ideas can't be patented" argument. You need to either pay me $20,000 dollars to licence your use of the idea for this discussion only, or else retract the comment, admit that you are in error, ad henceforth withdraw from the debate.
And that is one reason why it's dangerous to allow ideas
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test [wikipedia.org]
Read.
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I can understand why people would be against software patents for obvious ideas, such as the one-click patent. But are these folks against all software patents, no matter how innovative and complex? If so, why? What makes software patents so special that they should not be allowed?
There are various arguments for disallowing all software (and similar "business methods" patents), as they are currently outlawed in Europe. However, the main one is that software is basically too slippery for any patents office adequately to adjudicate on. Physical inventions are far easier to award patents for because things like prior art have a least some chance of being discovered and you can't easily derive a machine from another machine.
This is of course an unfortunate state of affairs for the writer
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Software should be copyrighted, NOT patented. Period. No matter how innovative, no matter how complex, no matter how many billion people think it's really cool. No patents. Patents are for physical, concrete, touchable and feelable items. Tangible, as opposed to intangible. All software is just a specific way of rearranging ones and zeros, after all. You can't actually make anything new with them.
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They CAN be, but they SHOULDN'T be. That's my position, and I'm not budging. Unless you have something physical, or at least make physical changes to something physical, then you're in copyright land.
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No. Math is not patentable. Software is math. Algorithms are math.
Also, Alan Turing says, "Fuck you."
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Wow, Alan Turing says that software is math [wikipedia.org], and some random asshole lawyer with no real mathematical or computer science background says it is not. I wonder who I'm going to go with...
Dumbass.
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Your assumption that they've in favour of other patents says more about your opinions than theirs.
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You don’t have to come up with analogies. Just look at the issues we’ve had with the GIF format, the LAME MP3 encoder, H.263 video codec, etc.
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PLUS Opera's Turbo mode is great for people with slow connections like Dialup or Cellular/wireless. It makes the connection look about 5 times faster than it really is.
Opera's innovations remind me of how Mosaic (and later Netscape) innovated in the early 90s.
Correlation/causation (Score:3, Informative)
However, still nice to see people trying something different.
Re:Correlation/causation (Score:4, Informative)
They track the browser downloads depending on source, so they do actually have a quite good idea how many people are installing via ballot screen.
Re:Correlation/causation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Correlation/causation (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers don't mean too much not for the reason you mention (as others have pointed out, they probably correlate the IP address used for the download to the IP address's entry point and check the referrer for that hit) but because these are only downloads.
How many of those Polish potentially swayed by the "Opera Turbo technology - speed up your Internet connection" are actually going to -stick to- using Opera, rather than going back to IE or using another browser they might have downloaded through that same choice screen?
The only thing we can even remotely suggest is that if nothing else, the browser choice screen may have brought choice -awareness- to the masses more than any other effort has done so far. That alone is a Good Thing(TM)
Re:Correlation/causation (Score:5, Informative)
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part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen
I see this differently. The ballot screen somehow caused Opera to create a new version.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster may have something to do with it as well.
Re:Correlation/causation (Score:5, Informative)
was also appalled that it wasn't free; they wanted me to pay for it!
Note that Opera has been completely free for years (since 2005). (And even before that, long before Firefox existed, you had the option of paying or a small ad.) I'm not sure why the idea of commercial sortware is "appalling" - I mean, you're running this on Windows!
I'd certainly recommend trying it again - Opera has been continually improved, and it's not really fair to judge it today based on a five year old version. (Also it's unclear whether the webpage problems were due to bugs/limitations in Opera, or because of poorly written webpages that are only written for IE and Firefox.)
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Free still means "no cost" in the English language, despite the best efforts of RMS to have everything his way.
Testing burden (Score:5, Insightful)
IE is the burden. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IE is the burden. (Score:4, Insightful)
To make things worse, each version of IE sucks in its distinctive way.
That's a real pain. I used to do some Web developing part-time and I know that. When I was doing the job I had Firefox as the main testing browser and voila, my site automagicaly looked and worked the same in Firefox, Opera and Chrome/Safari without tweaking the standard-compliant code (extensively validated using W3C's tools). For each version of IE I had to maintain different hacks, test them, and make it couldn't break in the standard-compliant browsers, AND still pass the validation, AND keep the hacks as maintainable as possible.
I learned a lot trying to do it and I was glad I made it. I'm doubly glad that I probably don't have to do it again.
Re:Testing burden (Score:4, Informative)
It's going to be a long time until the average web developer gets to "let's test on Opera!" Unless they have a rich customer using it that they happen to know about. Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
Of course if you want to do the IE and Safari tests properly, you need a VM for each browser, since IE and Safari versions don't play nice alongside newer IE versions. And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery, and even when you've done that it doesn't work quite 100% right... so really, for "simplicity", we just use a VM for every browser except the most current.
To add to the confusion, you can't even test on older versions of Chrome even if you want to, because Google claims since Chrome auto-updates itself, it's literally impossible for someone to be running a year-old version-- yeah, right, Google! I'm sure angels will begin farting out software updates to modem users any day now!
Firefox on a stick (Score:3, Informative)
And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery
Or you use the "portable" versions [portableapps.com], designed to be installed to removable media, that do this dickery for you.
Isn't that Web Purpose FAIL: less portability (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?
So when you think about creating an application and you worry about porting it between different clients, the decision "let's make it a web app! We'll have to test fewer platforms" runs counter to your purpose, right? In other words: people have turned the web into something it wasn't meant to be---a portability nightmare.
Yeah, writing desktop apps exposes you to differences between OSes. Okay, but all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth: they do the same things but in slightly different ways. Wrap the differences in libportability and get over it.
Maybe my attitude betrays my lack of coffee, but isn't it basically right? You don't have worse portability for desktop applications than you do for web applications.
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I always test on Opera because I can't install Chrome at work. (Well, I can, but it insists on ignoring my organization's Windows policies, and installs itself to Documents & Settings, which is wiped every time I log out. )
So I test on Firefox 3.6, Opera, and IE7. (Because my organization hasn't moved to IE8.)
I've never run into an instance where Opera didn't match either IE7 or Firefox 3.6. (this is mostly testing other people's shit.)
No, it's probably not ever going to be the first thing I test. But I
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There was an anecdote on one of the Opera employee's blogs on how they looking to buy new servers, which nowadays are of course managed via a web-interface. They got offers and test equipment from some server companies, and one of the higher ups in the company was doing the evaluation, so he had to use the web-interface. He opened it up in his browser (you can guess which it is he's using), and immediately came the pop-up message "This browser is not supported".
Interestingly Microsoft offers Virtual PC VM's
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Ah, here's the story [slashdot.org], told better.
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I figure just write your page in perfect compliance and say fuck any browser that fails to currently render it properly. Should one day browsers become compliant to standards they'll be able to work with the pages then and re-writing won't be necessary and you won't have wasted time supporting multiple browsers.
Of course, this only works on not-important, mission critical web pages.
Big Three? You are not a web developer (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, let me give you the reality of web development. You build it on firefox because it is simply the fucking best development browser. Then you give a brief test to Chrome/Opera, both of which have high quality dev environments as well (but firebug is just in a class of its own) and are typically fairly easy to debug. If you followed standards, then I rarely run into problems. Then, if you got a Mac, you test Safari. No problem there either usually.
And then, having spend 1% of you project time so far, you go to IE. IE6, IE7, IE8. All three are different.
And where real human beings upgrade their real browsers, the degenerates that use IE never ever upgrade but expect everything to work perfectly on decade old software.
Oh and guess which browser is the least likely to work EVEN if you follow its own "standards"? And then there are the version differences...
So no. Opera doesn't add any significant amount of testing. All of the 4 big other browsers (Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera) put together don't take a fraction of the time to debug that IE does.
Why do you think web developers celebrated when Google recently decided that IE6 was no longer going to be directly supported?
If Google were to put IE on a complete ban, then they could officially for ever change their motto to "do good".
Nintendo? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wii has 64 MB of RAM (Score:2)
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Re:Nintendo? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that Nintendo isn't a monopoly. They share the console market with Microsoft and Sony, and the handheld market with Sony.
There are a lot of things you can do if you're not a monopoly that you can't if you are.
Nor do I want anybody telling me Microsoft Windows isn't a monopoly. There's legal and practical definitions for these things, and they don't require there to be absolutely no competition.
Death of the proprietary browser monopoly? (Score:2, Interesting)
Opera Mini (Score:5, Informative)
As long as we're spreading the Opera love...
I've tried but never really have gotten into Opera on the desktop. However on mobile devices -- dumbphones and smartphones and PDAs -- it's pretty much the only game in town.
http://m.opera.com/ [opera.com]
The interface is quite fast, even on my crappy old Samsung. Difficult to believe it's a Java midp, given the responsiveness with which you can scroll around the page, zoom in/out, and slide back. It's much better than the built-in browsers that I've used on Samsung, Blackberry, older Palm devices, etc. and I even use it sometimes on my wife's Android phone. And it has some sort of bookmark sync thing tied to your account.
Anyway, if it wasn't for opera mini, I wouldn't have been able to get by with my dumb phone on a cheap wap plan for so long. Also with my Blackberry and Palm it allowed me to hit some javascript-heavy pages when I didn't have access to a computer (airline check-ins, etc.) and the built-in browsers just wouldn't hack it. So it's an essential piece to have on your mobile device.
Downsides:
* sometimes I lose my bookmarks, I think when I exit out of it too fast and my device kills java before it's finished cleaning up.
* My phone puts java apps in a really annoying place without a quick shortcut to it (Tools | My Files | Games).
* It disables my phone's standby for some reason.
* Opera Mini 5 beta doesn't work, but Opera Mini 4 works great. YMMV
* java nags to grant the app network access every time I launch a new session.
But it's awesome enough that I put up with those inconveniences to use it :P
Microsoft Great Software? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Goes to show that Microsoft IE has a large market share not because it is a great product, but because it locking competitors out.
I hope others improve too. (Score:2)
Opera is the only one that cares (Score:2)
Since Opera is the only commercial browser from the alternatives, it has the most to gain/lose by this battle.
Apple doesn't give a shit about Safari downloads and Google just wants people to use a modern browser, any browser as long as it isn't IE. And firefox, in europe which is the area we are talking about, is already pretty big. If FF doubled their downloads, there would be no more IE.
Aaah... that is a nice thought.
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What happens when they hit 11?
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Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_rule
Statistics can be misleading.
Links can be misleading, too. That link had absolutely nothing to do with the Simpsons.
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What's this got to do with Link? [wikipedia.org]
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At least nobody thought he was talking about links [wikipedia.org]... you know, the ones that require you coding an <a href=>.
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That'd probably be funnier if I didn't spend so much time out on the links [wikipedia.org]...
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I was just reading about that via Lynx [wikipedia.org].
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I read it via Lynx [wikipedia.org] on Linux [wikipedia.org] whilst cruising down the Link [wikipedia.org], listening to Link [wikipedia.org] and watching Link [wikipedia.org]....but then the Link [wikipedia.org] went down.
Re:That's very nice Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be lonely, or only know idiots. Opera has been at the forefront of web technologies and open standards for years. PS. Check market share in Russia.
Re:That's very nice Opera (Score:5, Funny)
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For a minute there I thought you were referring to the this "The Big O" [wikipedia.org]. I watch too much anime...
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That would explain why I'm always pressing it on my iPhone and expecting to get the GPS app.
Re:That's very nice Opera (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera must be doing something right, that all the other browsers are missing. Go ahead, look at market share in eastern Europe, and especially among people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that a LOT of people take Opera seriously.
I've tested it, in several incarnations now. I'll bet I could still find my license file somewhere, if I tried hard enough. It has some pretty neat features, no matter what language you speak. That sharing thing, for instance - any idiot can share files, photos, whatever with their family, in a reasonably secure manner, without jumping through a lot of hoops.
You should drive it, before you dump on it.
I'm not switching, because Firefox suits my needs and wants, but if I were to switch, Opera would be a good browser to consider. In fact, it comes in side by side with Chrome, in my books.
Re:That's very nice Opera (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Opera for ages. For a long time, it was really the only choice for power users. Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl when you had more than a few dozen pages open. Back in my Pentium II 200MHz days, I needed 200 pages open to inconvenience Opera. It's still one of the browsers with the smallest memory footprint, although it's not leading by as much as it used to.
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It really came in handy for me way back in the day when I was constantly using Dial up on the road. Toggling off loading images was a great feature and I could work on multiple pages at once while waiting for background pages to load.
As it went on though, It just ended up getting more and more bloated. Just tried out the newest version though and I have to say I am very impressed with the facelift but its just not fast enough to edge out chrome for the sites I browse. I might dump it on my laptop when the 1
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Re:Same old mistakes (Score:4, Insightful)
With all the supposedly intelligent and future thinking people pushing the Internet forward, I am stunned at their inability to comply with W3C standards. Yeah, yeah, W3C documents are the 'drying paint' of the internet, but they are what all browser developers are supposed to be aiming for. I think they all need new glasses.
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Re:Same old mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right in that it sucks that you can be standards compliant and still render things differently from another standards compliant browser, but it's important to note that the differences between Gecko, WebKit and Opera's rendering engine are generally quite small and can often easily be worked around in the last day or two of a large project, but when it comes to Trident it's like entering non-euclidiean space, menus disappear or appear on the wrong side of a page, other elements magically ignore that you just told them their size and none of this ever has a simple "oh, we'll just tweak it a little" solution, it always seems to involve moving stuff around a lot and writing mangled IE-specific non-standards compliant CSS just to trick Trident into rendering things the right way.
So yeah, there is a problem with ambiguity in the standards but Trident rendering standards compliant sites so wrong they're not even usable is a much bigger issue which will hopefully be solved if we can get IE to no longer have a majority share of the browser market.
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When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
Each browser developer seems to interpret the standard differently ... or only implement it partially (or rather, incompletely). When the five largest browser developers (among others) don't implement the standard properly or completely it's the developers and not the standard.
Re:Same old mistakes (Score:4, Interesting)
When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
What's wrong with W3C standards is that there's never been a reference implementation, which means there's a lot of room for interpretation, and interpretations can vary a lot. And after they've been implemented, people start discussing which implementations are closest to what the standard intended, after which people need to fix their browser, and in the mean time, we've got a big bloody mess.
Reference implementations are important.
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Isn't that Amaya?
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Care to show us some of the pages you’ve designed?
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":first-child" is not some new CSS3 thing and it doesn't work in IE6. There's at least 10 such css selectors or properties I use in IE7 that don't work in IE6 that have been around for years. Also, have you never heard of a child selector?
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Well, the standards do suck ass.
I mean, CSS (IMO at least) was completely useless for serious website development until version 3, when it finally gained columns. *Columns!!* One of the most fundamental page layout concepts, and CSS didn't get it until version 3.0! Sure, you could make a box with a dotted top border and a dashed bottom border, but you can't make two fucking columns without workarounds. It still doesn't have math, making simple constructs like "5px + 3em" impossible. (You can't do the math a
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For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.
I’m betting there’s a better way. But without knowing what your script does, I can’t be positive.
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- There isnt so many engines. A lot of browsers are based on webkit or could be based on it (like with the chrome plugin for IE). Actually the main engines are gecko, webkit, and the ones in opera and IE, but could be a run to standarize in i.e. webkit for some ofthe browsers that don't use it now (would be an interesting move for Opera, and the others could do it gradually... IE already have a
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Amusingly, it's presented by IE, so you still have to click though the three or four pages of setting your IE8 preferences, and it doesn't replace. I'd understood IE was to be removed, but I wasn't really listening.
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>>>the ballot is presented by IE
Correction - The ballot WAS presented by IE, but Opera and others objected, so the EU ordered Microsoft to use a generic window.
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how many non-slashdot-readers do you think know that ?
Re:Give me a break.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
Microsoft isn't required to do anything by anyone. The Browser Ballot Screen is entirely thought up and implemented by Microsoft themselves.
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Doing something while under investigation by one of the most powerful political organizations in the world, to avoid having that organization levy hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of fines, is a strange definition of free will.
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While technically true, it's a little less misleading if you put it like this:
The EU told MS that IE bundled with Windows was a problem. If MS didn't do anything the EU would probably require that IE be removed, which would be a major undertaking. MS suggested a ballot screen as an option and the EU decided that was an acceptable compromise.
Yes, MS suggested the solution. No, they wouldn't have done it except to avoid a far worse solution being imposed by the EU. I'm not sure exactly what the point of y
Avoiding the appearance of tying (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
Windows is Microsoft's own product, which holds market power [wikipedia.org] over home PC operating systems. The browser ballot is Microsoft's way of avoiding the appearance of anticompetitive tying [wikipedia.org] to EU regulators.
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I find it a little strange that USA prosecuted Microsoft as an illegal leverager of a monopoly - this should have happened sooner. Maybe the IE team wouldn't have been disbanded.
Microsoft put out a crappy browser and then stopped developing it, thinking people would just give up on standards and write for IE. I find that strange as well.
I'm sure there are other aspects which qualify as strange.
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Re:Give me a break.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
I'm not a fan of strangling women or anything but I still find it a little strange that Gary Leon Ridgway is being required to "promote the safety of women" in his own housing choices, by living in a small cell away from society.
Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using.
Perhaps Anthony Hopkins and every man should be required to live in a cell.
Let's start the insanity...
I think your insanity is in assuming people convicted of a crime should not be punished and forced to make reparations to society because non-criminals are not punished. That's pretty fucking nuts dude.
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So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
What a fucked up world we live in.
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Your comparison makes no sense. First of all, Starbucks doesn't have a monopoly in the coffeemarket. But even more obvious, they aren't using their influence in the coffeemarket to gain a monopoly in the sandwichmarket.
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So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
Nope. If, however, Starbucks doubled their market share and qualified as a monopoly and then gave away a free sandwich with each coffee (while rolling their costs into the price of coffee, usually called bundling) then they would be guilty of violating competition laws.
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So how is this different from the iPhone not allowing any other browsers?
Because the iPhone doesn't have a monopoly in the phonemarket.
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Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
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Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
Actually it's the desktop OS market. MS doesn't even sell a computer of their own. Steve Jobs, being a bright guy, already knows this fact and knows that his company bears some responsibility since they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market. Of course the fact that MS's monopoly power would make that a crazy business move probably figures in.
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they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market
You lost me there.
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The iPhone has no monopoly in telephones. THAT's how it's different.
As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.
Re:I still don't understand (Score:4, Informative)
this is like Apple hand-picking which apps are allowed in the app store, except on a much bigger scale
And there you have the answer to your own question. Governments regulate how monopolists are allowed to leverage their monopolies. This question comes up in every discussion of this nature. You're either new here or you have a learning disability.
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Hmm, you must have been living in a cave the past 20 years. You should come out for air a little more often.... ;)
MS is a convicted monopolist. They have been fined more than $2,000,000,000 over the years for illegal business practices. The ballot thing is merely the latest remedy imposed by the EU.
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Every week I see cool new features demonstrated [zurb.com]. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.
The difference is those are features still being developed and in the process of being standardized. Your basic failure of understanding is motivation. A monopolist who can push their browser without working on its merits has little or no incentive to be interoperable with competitors. Every other company, however, has direct financial incentive to make their browser interoperable in order to gain market share. With no one party dominant, standards compliance becomes the lifeblood of every browser.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)