5punk

HereComesPete wrote:But in the early days of the world wide web if not IE then what? A million different standards? A million ways of writing a web page? All of them incompatible with the other?

There are standards, defined by the W3C for 15 years and everyone but Microsoft complies with them.

The reason so many pages only work with IE is, as market leader, that's what they (or the bespoke apps which produce them) were designed to work with because "everybody had it"

People without Windows didn't, so I'd say yeah - that's hurt the growth of the web.

Pages produced complying to standards (and thus working with most every other browser) wouldn't neccesarily render correctly in IE. Their own special versions of Java and Javascript, plus lazyboy ActiveX-generating applications in the Visual/.NET suite have only made everything worse. Fortunately, awesome people like Wordpress, phpBB and the like see a bit further and make fully-compatible easy content-generation tools which work with everything.

Stoat wrote:The tying was the issue, as there was no reason to do it other than to make IE a "required" component.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_%28commerce%29

Tying, in this case, should be permitted, because without IE you won't be browsing the internet, AND in fact isn't tying, because IE is freely downloadable if it wouldn't be supplied with your Windows, in fact it's free so I don't believe tying applies.

So, what's next, EU, will you strictly forbid supplying the network drivers with a motherboard because some bastard might whip another one up for the same motherboard in the distant future? DIDN'T WE* ELECT YOU TO MAKE SENSE?

* in fact, I didn't.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/wind ... stalling-e

Silly EU regulators.

Fucking ridiculous.

*loads usb sticks up with the big 5 browers, adds a happy installer app, sells for tenner a pop*

Sorted.

FatherJack wrote:There are standards, defined by the W3C for 15 years and everyone but Microsoft complies with them.

:'( IE can get to fuck.