I can’t believe we are still dealing with this non-issue of Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, let alone looking to the European Union (EU) to give the company another slap for antitrust violations in the matter. On top of that Mozilla has come out on the same side as the EU regulators complaining about Microsoft’s actions. It’s not like past action of the EU regulators made any difference when they force Microsoft to sell a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player bundled with the OS. In fact European OEMs gave Windows N the cold shoulder because no-one wanted the stripped down version. Do we really think that an IE less version of Windows will fair any better?

As far as the monopoly angle that everyone is whining about I think felix over at #comments has the right idea when he said the following in a post today

But that’s not what this law suit is about. It’s about Microsoft’s monopoly. Really? Come on. Are we still on this crap? Microsoft’s browser share has been falling steadily for years – this is non-trivial stuff. Their share is being steadily and meaningfully eroded. It’s not a monopoly anymore. There’s competition. Look Opera, I know you have a cult following, but people just don’t want your browser. Firefox is moving up the charts, so it can obviously be done. Why does the law need to be brought into this?

The fact is that if Microsoft hadn’t been the dominant browser they way it had we might not even have Firefox because it only came about because people were pissed with Internet Explorer. If anything the dominance of IE has spurred browser development as we have Google Chrome slowly making its way up the popularity tree and along with it and Firefox Apple’s Safari has seen a growth in users since it came out with a Windows version. this was the point that Michael Masnick at Techdirt tried to make in his post on this today

Last month, it seemed silly that EU regulators were pursuing Microsoft for antitrust violations in the browser market for bundling IE. It was clear that some of the initial complaints had come from Opera — an also-ran in the browser market. However, it seemed silly because there is vibrant and growing competition in the marketplace. Firefox has continued to grow its market share, and in the past few years we’ve seen new entrants in the browser market from Apple and Google — both of whom have established small, but significant footholds.

So tell me – where the hell is the monopoly?

Personally I think Internet Explorer is still a pile of crap – IE8 is better but compared to the other browsers it is a bloated trojan attracting website breaking pile of crap, and this comes from some-one who has been a faithful IE user for years. Now however I have switched over to Chrome and haven’t looked back since. And I am not alone as looking at the browser market share numbers will tell you – IE is losing its dominate position slowly but surely.

I still hold out hope for the venerable browser though but I also believe that Microsoft needs to start over from scratch. Take their best minds and coders that deal with the web – lock them in a room and restart their browser effort. Key principals should be – extremely light footprint, extensible but without those stupid and dangerous Browser Object Add-ons and finally be totally web compliant – not Microsoft’s version but real compliance.

But this stupidity of Mozilla joining the appeal to the EU for action against Microsoft give me a break. all it is doing is making Mozilla look like a bunch of whiners.