Wickham
13 Jun 2009, 05:20 AM
My newspaper says that IE is to be removed from Microsoft operating system 7 in Europe (so perhaps it won't happen outside Europe).
MS has been forced onto the defensive by European Regulators after a complaint by the Norwegian owners of Opera about the uncompetitive market for browsers.
I remember that the same thing happened when Netscape complained in the early 1990s and Microsoft lost a court case but IE still remained in the OS; whether MS paid a fine I can't remember. Netscape found it very hard to survive.
It seems that MS will offer computer manufacturers the choice of having IE pre-installed or not and most are still expected to have IE bundled in the OS.
I think that people without IE on their computers will not be able to get automatic software updates from Microsoft although they will be able to download them individually with other browsers, which will be too much trouble for most computer users who won't know which to download, so I expect most people will still want IE pre-installed.
MS has been forced onto the defensive by European Regulators after a complaint by the Norwegian owners of Opera about the uncompetitive market for browsers.
I remember that the same thing happened when Netscape complained in the early 1990s and Microsoft lost a court case but IE still remained in the OS; whether MS paid a fine I can't remember. Netscape found it very hard to survive.
It seems that MS will offer computer manufacturers the choice of having IE pre-installed or not and most are still expected to have IE bundled in the OS.
I think that people without IE on their computers will not be able to get automatic software updates from Microsoft although they will be able to download them individually with other browsers, which will be too much trouble for most computer users who won't know which to download, so I expect most people will still want IE pre-installed.