It seems that Microsoft gets sued all the time (mostly for good reasons), but Opera just filed in Microsoft’s least favorite place of all, EU. Opera claims that the corporate giant is killing competition by bundling IE with Microsoft’s OS. Opera would like the EU commission to force Microsoft to remove IE from their OS or include other browsers with it, namely Opera. Opera claims that web designers build sites with IE in mind due to the fact that it is the most widely used browser. As such, other browsers won’t render pages correctly, forcing users to use IE.
Now I find this kind of lawsuit kind of strange because if consumers truly want to use another browser, they can. I’m not sure if Opera is pissed that Microsoft is giving their browser away, and Opera would like the world to start paying for browsers. All Opera has to do is make a better browser than IE, and people will find you. Just like people have found FireFox, which is a superior browser than IE. I can’t see how forcing Microsoft to remove IE will make web designers create web pages for all browsers.
I use FireFox for 99% of all my browsing needs, and if a page won’t render correctly, I suck it up and stomach IE for the 1% of the time required. Opera should stop the madness and just make a browser that people want to use. Trust me, if we like it, we’ll use you.
[Engadget]
