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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Why force people to make a choice? It's in the best interest of the computer user to have a browser installed by default. Since Microsoft makes a browser, it makes sense to use that one with their operating system. End of story.

Yeah, there's history behind this, but really, it was TWELVE YEARS AGO. It's time to move on.

An operating system should come with some basic tools like a command shell, file manager, web browser, text editor, calculator, media player etc. As a user, if I want to upgrade any one of those things, I can do so. But please don't leave them off the system just because there are 3rd party alternatives. And please don't show me a screen full of options for every one of them.

This was a silly issue to squabble over back in the 90's, and it's only gotten sillier since.

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Back then people didn't take issue with IE shipping with windows, but as Windows. MS tried its typical bullying tactics to squeeze out competitors. IE became so tightly integrated into Windows that it a) couldn't be removed without wrecking the OS, and b) enjoyed low-level (performance enhancing) OS access that was refused to competing browser/app makers.

So it was not silly to "squabble" over it. MS wanted to dominate the web as a proprietary platform and extension of Windows. This was a real threat back then.

You could be using "IE 5.8 service pack 14" right now, writing jscript (not javascript), MSHTML, and active-x plugins, enjoying horrific security issues exacerbated by a browser monoculture, and being treated as a second class citizen if you use any other browser than said IE 5.8, since you'd have to reverse engineer all the interfaces and get sued in the process to make active-x etc. work in competing browsers.

Your first paragraph made sense. I think you lost it in the IE5.8 world. Which is why you may have been down-voted.

I think the point being that removing/unbundling the browser may not be as important as making sure that users aren't only locked in to using your browser.

I think you forgot that Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the consumer OS market, and as such a company in such a position, is subject to a lot of governmental regulation and scrutiny. Microsoft's ability to do anything with windows should be looked at carefully by all anti-trust bodies in all countries.

With this in mind, the governments must create a free market for browsers where there is a mono-culture of operating systems.

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