Comments on: Mozilla Unofficially Joins ECIS and Opera in Opposition to Microsoft’s Deal in Europe; Microsoft Poisoned Firefox

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:43:32 +0000

Mozilla didn’t have much luck with antitrust authorities in Europe.

By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:49:29 +0000

Google is helping Internet Explorer out through that plugin. Microsoft is in such a good position because they get free quality help.

However, Google is giving them such headaches that they’d shoot themselves in the foot by rejecting the plugin. As long as IE has a lot of market share, Google’s fortunes depend on people being able to use their services through IE. Microsoft can play the game of attrition (delay while hurting themselves as well) and then pick up Google’s pieces. Google is in a much more vulnerable position.

Fortunately, Google is working on their FOSS OS. They probably want netbooks and such to be really successful since that is a bit of a blank slate where consumers have a different set of expectations and Windows can’t really run the big desktop apps well.

Antitrust authorities should not allow Microsoft to leverage their OS monopoly, for example, when they used that monopoly to plant the Firefox “plugin”.

By: Will

Will — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:48:47 +0000

Here is an article talking about the Google Frame in IE performance:

http://news.techworld.com/networking/3202572/internet-explorer-8-runs-ten-times-faster-with-google-chrome-plug-in/

Turns out it was a 9.6x performance boost, to be precise, and the benchmark was the SunSpider JavaScript suite.

By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:37:47 +0000

It’s a losing battle trying to beat Microsoft on Windows.

Microsoft can sabotage every single application they want and without saying anything.

Guess what? Firefox will simply fail to work well on some popular website or something. And if/when someone finds something fishy (which is tough to do if the problem is instability or performance degradation), then Microsoft can just say it was a bug.

It’s much easier for Microsoft to create bugs than it is for others to find them without having access to Microsoft’s source. And some bugs can be ingenious.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:46:31 +0000

And MS did ended up agreeing to block this plug-in as you can see in the bugzilla report.

By: finalzone

finalzone — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:24:48 +0000

I also saw that on Microsoft Windows XP on my laptop (primarly used for Flash edition requested by some clients) and desktop after I have installed NBA 2k10 (too bad it depends on .NET). It is not the first time Microsoft does that action because it had sabotage rival products before.

It will hardly surprising other browser such as Chrome and Opera will encounter the same problem.

By: williami

williami — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:24:26 +0000

Luckly, Firefox caught wind of this malpractice:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522777

Only if someone gives me air tickets to Redmond to start a protest about this…