Opera filing complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft
14th December 2007
A message from Chris Mills, Opera:
Hi there,
We are filing a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, to try to force them to support web standards properly, and to decouple Internet Explorer from Windows. We think these actions are essential for the evolution of web standards and the open web, which Microsoft is hindering due to it’s dominant market share controlling consumer choice in web browsers and trying to force web developers to adopt proprietary technologies and techniques (ie hacks, and things like
Silverlight.) For more information, check out:
1. Håkon Wium Lie’s open letter to the web community at http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/msft/
2. Opera’s press release on the subject at http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2007/12/13/
We are doing this because we care about web standards and the open web, not because we are seeking any kind of monetary (or other) gain from the hopefully positive outcome.
Obviously decoupling IE from Windows might sound a bit strange - what would you do then, even if you did want to download another browser?
We are not asking for IE to be taken off Windows, rather we are requesting that users be given more of a choice in some way, or for other browsers to at least be acknowledged. The European Commission itself says that anything more than 40% market share begins to become illegally anti-competitive. Surely this rule applies here.
If you agree with us in this, then show your support by:
1. Blogging about it
2. Forwarding this to others in your network/company/group of friends 3. Getting your company to issue a press release about this in support, if appropriate
Thanks for listening.
Chris Mills
Developer Relationship Manager
Opera Software ASA
December 21st, 2007 at 15:30
UPDATES
Source: channel9.msdn.com
IE 8: On the Path to Web Standards Compliance - ACID 2 Test Pass Complete
Posted by Charles // Wed, Dec 19, 2007 4:36 PM
The IE team has been very hard at work on IE 8 for the past several months and they hit a huge milestone last Friday evening. The IE dev team checked in a bunch of code that included several new features implemented in the core rendering engine that enable IE to pass the ACID 2 test! This is great news for web developers: IE 8 is going to be our most standards compliant browser to date. Passing ACID 2 is really a combined side effect of all the new features that have been developed for IE 8.
In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team’s ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who actually write technology so we take a walk from Dean’s office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky’s office to discuss what’s been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.
Tune in!
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/0/IE8ACID2Final.wmv