[plug] More Microsoft Trial stuffups...

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Tamara Thompson wrote:

> Um, you guys probably know how I feel about Netscape
> --and freedom of choice where software is concerned. 

> But I for one do believe the future of applications will depend heavily 
> on browser integration.  For one thing, it frees the app from being
> machine specific.
You must be joking?

The integration has meant that the app has become _completely_ tied to the
one operating system. It does not have complete functionality on any other
platform.

I assume you cannot mean what you seem to mean.
Are you trying to say that you think applets embedded in browsers are a
good idea? I'm sure many would agree, but there is no connection to
browser integration. So what exactly did you mean?

> for another, it presents a uniform interface to the user.
Hmmm. Maybe. I think the IE4 interface is significantly less uniform than
the Win95 one, since there are still 95isms lying around.
At any rate, using the browser as a shell has little bearing on the
uniformity of the interface. (other than the fact that a browser is only
designed to perform a small subsection of the tasks of a GUI, leading to a
lack of uniformity when trying to deal with things outside the browsers
usual scope)

> I'm interested in the issue of whether MS has made their OS incompatible
> with other browsers?  Why can't the user simply ignore the bundled
> browser and replace it with one of choice?  I suspect that is not so
> easy?  
Replacing the web-browsing aspect of IE is easy - though IE will still hog
a great deal of memory while you are running your other browser, because
you can't close IE - but replacing the GUI shell aspect of IE is no easier
than it has been to replace the shell on any previous Windows version.

The actual issue is this:
<rant accuracy=rough bias=anti-microsoft>
Microsoft put a copy of Explorer on their later Win95 CDs, at seemingly in
order to prevent people from downloading/buying/using Netscape.
The US government has laws preventing monopoly power in one market to be
used to influence independent markets, so Microsoft were tried and asked
to desist from the "product-tying"practise.
Microsoft tried to get around the law by claiming that IE4 is part of the
Win98 operating system.
When pulled up for doing this, (Which is what the present court case
is about, though it has since expanded to cover many more issues of
anticompetitive practises and abuse of monopolistic poer) they tried to
claim that the "integration" was an improvement to the OS, but
unfortunately have been completely unable to substantiate this rather
ridiculous claim, and the URLs that were posted here earlier were about
humiliations Microsft suffered while unsuccessfully trying to demonstrate
advantages of their product-tying.
</rant>
Fortunately they don't seem to be fooling anyone,

-Greg Mildenhall (Who would like to see the US Gov. accept Microsoft's
demands not to interfere in the software market - by getting rid of such
Govt. interference as software patents and perhaps even copyright)