Bonum Certa Men Certa

Mozilla Unofficially Joins ECIS and Opera in Opposition to Microsoft's Deal in Europe; Microsoft Poisoned Firefox

“...[C]ut off Netscape’s air supply.”

--Paul Maritz, Vice President, Microsoft (Now VMWare CEO)



Blue desktop



Summary: Apple-Mozilla power struggle has just returned as a Mozilla employee expresses disdain; Microsoft's force-fed Firefox plug-in leaves the Web browser vulnerable

ECIS and Opera have both complained about the unreasonable interim deal [1, 2] which has upset those two for quite some time [1, 2]. Complaints from the public are on their way (as promised) and there is already a draft people are encouraged to participate in. It comes from Jukka Rannila of Finland



At the moment of sending the Opinion to the Commission there was still some time to the final deadline of opinions.

Readers are stron[g]ly recommended to send their comments before 7 November 2009.


In addition to the above -- and contradicting what Sam Dean wrote about a week ago -- Mozilla too is reportedly dissatisfied.

What browser do you use in Windows? Apparently if you live in Europe, the answer is a resounding Safari. That is right folks, in the great ballot poll, Firefox lost out to the lowly webkit-based Safari.

Apple must be so proud, their baby is still not a great browser, but is all the rage.

[...]

Problem is, when you put FireFox that far down on the list, it loses to Safari. Guess who is hating the EU tonight all of a sudden? Don’t expect this to stick.


Here is the original, which also states: "This is my personal opinion and doesn’t reflect Mozilla’s official position or any formal statement from Mozilla." The Microsoft crowd would possibly incite for boycotts if Mozilla speaks out officially.

We previously showed that Apple is closer to Microsoft than most people realise and Mozilla complained about Apple's vision of a duopoly with Microsoft.

Mozilla has better reasons to be upset with Microsoft though. Our reader Will has shown us this report, which goes roughly two days back.

An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Mozilla's Firefox last February leaves the browser open to attack, Microsoft's security engineers acknowledged earlier this week.


"Clever," argues Glyn Moody, ".NET flaw manages to compromise Firefox as well as IE."

Will reminds us of the fact that Microsoft not only blocked Google but it also rejected its good plug-in that fixed Internet Explorer; adding insult to injury, Microsoft's hypocrisy was seemingly infinite because Microsoft had pushed a .NET extension into Mozilla Firefox without users' consent [1, 2]. Going back to what Microsoft did to Firefox and the impact, "It was addressed by a recent patch," argues Will, "but still, considering Microsoft recently tried to FUD the Chrome Frame plugin in IE."

Based on Will's recollection, "they got a 10x performance boost out of IE by using the Frame engine instead of the IE one."

“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”

--Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark

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