Rants

Posted on 8 Sep 2009 at 14:29

 

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Recently I've got sick and tired of browser companies sticking their oar in, complaining that it's anti-competitive that Windows 7 will be shipped with Internet Explorer.

The shouts, loudest from Opera and Google, have forced Microsoft to take the rather drastic decision of offering to implement a ballot system in Europe. Under the new plans, rather than just getting one browser when you install Windows 7, you'll get a web page where you can choose which of the top browsers - IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera - you want to install.

Fair enough, you might think, as this opens up competition. You're right, but the choice seems limited and rather arbitrarily decided and based on perceived browser popularity. Depending on which survey you believe, Opera has somewhere between 0.4 and one per cent of the browser market, making it significantly less popular than all the other browsers in the ballot.

A similar argument could be made for Safari, which currently enjoys around 8.5 per cent of the browser market - the large majority of this on Apple Macs. So, why should we be offered this browser on PCs?

What about other browsers, such as SeaMonkey? Where's the support for them? If the ballot is about increasing competition, then every browser should be included.

Personally, I'm going to take the source code for Firefox (it's open source, so I can do that) and just rewrite the titlebar, so the browser's called DaveFox 3.5. I'm then going to complain to the EU that Microsoft is being anti-competitive for excluding DaveFox 3.5 from its ballot screen. I'd like everyone else to do the same thing and create their own browser. We'll then petition the EU until the ballot screen is thousands of pages of competing browsers and confusion; perhaps then some sense will be made of this whole affair and we can get Windows 7 with Internet Explorer installed, so it's nice and easy. Then, people who want a different browser can use IE8 to download the browser of their choice. A bit like today, really.

Author: David Ludlow