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Microsoft’s deadline for responding to the January EU antitrust complaint about Internet Explorer has been extended to April 21 according to Reuters. Microsoft had no comment, but according to European Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd, the delay was requested by Microsoft.
Dawn Kawamoto at CNET reports that a source says that Mozilla has moved to formally join the European Union case against Internet Explorer that was revealed in January.
Mozilla has been granted a seat at the table in the European Commission’s antitrust case against Microsoft, an EC source said Tuesday.
Mozilla requested and was granted "third-party status," which entitles the organization behind the popular Firefox browser to receive access to confidential documents in the case and the ability to voice objections, the source said.
Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker voices the corporate discontent even if she is a trifle fuzzy on what should be done about it:
Last month the European Commission stated its preliminary conclusion that “Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”
In my mind, there is absolutely no doubt that the statement above is correct. Not the single smallest iota of doubt. I’ve been involved in building and shipping web browsers continuously since before Microsoft started developing IE, and the damage Microsoft has done to competition, innovation, and the pace of the web development itself is both glaring and ongoing. There are separate questions of whether there is a good remedy, and what that remedy might be. But questions regarding an appropriate remedy do not change the essential fact. Microsoft’s business practices have fundamentally diminished (in fact, came very close to eliminating) competition, choice and innovation in how people access the Internet.
Swell (and I am no fan of Internet Explorer or the Web sites whose functionality is reduced for visitors using any other browser), but that is all water under the bridge at this point. The important question is what can or should be done about it now. The obvious answer seems to be that if the European Commission’s premise is accepted, then Microsoft should be required to ship other browsers with each copy of Windows, but I wonder if Baker’s coyness about remedies is actually part of an attempt to reopen the overall antitrust case against Windows.
At Microsoft’s IEBlog, Dean Hachamovitch announces that an Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate is now available:
We’re excited to make the IE8 Release Candidate available today for public download today in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please download it now and try it out. We welcome your feedback!
What’s New
The team will post more about all changes between Beta 2 and RC. In brief:
- Platform Complete. The technical community should expect the final IE8 release to behave as the Release Candidate does. The IE8 product is effectively complete and done. We’ll post separately about the thousands of additional test cases we’re contributing to the W3C. We’ve listened very carefully to feedback from the betas. With the Release Candidate, we’re listening carefully for critical issues.
- Reliability, Performance, and Compatibility improvements. We’ve studied the telemetry feedback about the browser’s underlying quality and addressed many issues.
- Security. We’ve worked closely with people in the security community to enable consumer-ready clickjacking protection. Sites can now protect themselves and their users from clickjacking attacks “out of the box,” without impacting compatibility or requiring browser add-ons. We also made some changes to InPrivate based on feedback from customers and partners.
So when does the final version arrive? There’s no final word other than Microsoft won’t ship it before it is ready, but Hachamovitch says that they will only be fixing the most critical issues before now and shipment.
And how about standards compliance issues which have continually dogged Internet Explorer and IE8? There seem to be definite improvements but IE8 still doesn’t pass the ACID test.
Norwegian browser vendor Opera apparently struck the fancy of European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes with their December 2007 complaint about Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows (more details including browser tie-ins like desktop search and Windows Live here). Today, Microsoft announced that they had received a billet-doux from Neelie in that regard:
Yesterday Microsoft received a Statement of Objections from the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission. The Statement of Objections expresses the Commission’s preliminary view that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows since 1996 has violated European competition law. According to the Statement of Objections, other browsers are foreclosed from competing because Windows includes Internet Explorer. The Statement of Objections states that the remedies put in place by the U.S. courts in 2002 following antitrust proceedings in Washington, D.C. do not make the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows lawful under European Union law.
I’m no fan of Internet Explorer and rarely use it, but I’m wondering what alternative the Commission has in mind since a PC operating system without a Web browser is a little hard to bootstrap into useful life these days. At the time of the complaint Opera had asked that the European Union "force Microsoft to unbundle IE from Windows, or include other browsers as a standard part of it." Why am I thinking of a repeat of Windows XP N, the version of XP without Media Player that nobody bought?
Microsoft is in an awkward position on this complaint after the browser flummery that went on at the US antitrust trial, but that frankly seems like ancient history now. In any case, Microsoft has the opportunity to respond to the Statement of Objections within two months and also request a hearing whereupon the elves of Brussels will decide what they want to be done.
