Opera wants to get over IE

13 June 2009 at 15:31 by Nur Sah Ketene

"The browser market will not be improved unless IE's monopoly comes to an end" says CEO of Opera

Opera board member John von Tetzchner said that he is sure that the case against Internet Explorer will end with beneficial results for the internet browser market. Otherwise with out the forcing of European Union commission Microsoft is not going to give up monopolistic behaviour. If EU commission decides that Microsoft created monopoly than it will help the market.

Even though I don’t like most of Microsoft’s behaviour still I think it is their right to use which ever browser they want to distribute with their own operating system. Otherwise EU should sue Apple for distributing Safari with Macs or Ubuntu for distributing Firefox. The consumer has the right to choose whichever browser that they want to use, but it is the consumers responsibility to search for a better or different products. But this does not mean that Microsoft Windows or any other operating system should stop the use of other browsers.

Editor’s note: The reason why the EC is “hounding” Microsoft is that it is the only player in the operating systems market that has a dominant market position. Microsoft has repeatedly abused it’s market position in pushing IE. Microsoft has a clear advantage over other players in that Internet Explorer is installed by default on all Windows computers, but installing any other browser requires effort and knowledge on behalf of the user.

Apple, or indeed Ubuntu, does not have anywhere near the market penetration that Microsoft Windows has. According to the AT Internet Institute February 2009 Operating Systems survey 93.82% of internet traffic comes from Microsoft operating systems. 4.59% of visits come from Apple computers and Linux user contribute just 1.24% of visits.

Looking at the AT Internet Institute Browser Barometer from April 2009, we can see that Internet Explorer still holds the majority, with a 63.6% market share. Mozilla has a share of 28.4%, and Safari is far behind with 3.4%.

— Matias Korhonen

The consumer is free to choose but if they don’t know about the other products it is their own choice and companies can not be held responsible on behalf of others.

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