Anti-competitive
Folks,
For the people who keep saying its MS`s OS they can do what they like. No they cant. They are a monopoly. Monoplies are not allowed to do what they like, they are restricted by law to protect the consumer. i.e. you. And for those who keep mentioning Mac and linux. Dont apple and linux do not have a monopoly on computers. Joe bloggs goes to PCworld and buys a Winbox the world over. Generally they might be aware of apple but wont touch it when they see the price and find out the latest and greatest game doesnt run on it (easily), they would not ever know what Redhat,debian etc are.
SO the question is what damage does MS do by supplying IE by default. That depends on your feelings towards IE. IF you know what your talking about your using an alternative which is less then 20% of the market. So MS owns 70% consertatively, which your probably agree is quite a lot. So average joe has a winbox with IE by default and may have AV protection, but possibly not. Start discussing malware with them and they are straight into nursery status. SO basically you have a sched load of vunerable pcs which go wrong, then the tech savvy get a call form there parents siblings etc. Hey my pcs stopped working/doing funny things. You go round and see how the latest and greatest IE vuln and trashed there box.
Is that a problem? yes, it is. As MS with its dominance let the browser marker go wild so did the end users problems go up. Competition makes companies improve things as with have seen with MS`s latest work following firefoxs abrupt intrusion. Anything that forces the (illegal) market leader to improve there software is a good thing in my book.
IE should be treated like Opera, Firefox.. You have to download/bundle it to run it. Perhaps a cut down browser(or crippled) could be included like Mosaic which allows you to view a browser list hosted by a third party, which includes a list of all popular browsers only. E.g. a new browser would need to achieve 5% of market share before it went on the popular list, so as to not confuse consumers too much. so a list may have, IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc. each would have a short list of features and merits including independant security ratings. You could download all of them if you chose. IE should be completely independant of Windows and vice versa, as FF,Opera etc are.
my 50 pence...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
