The original EU decision was a nonsense, but MS integrating IE into Windows was a bollocks full stop.

This amused me

Windows 8 Pro price drop was an error

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/windows ... ily%20news

I can't help wondering if that was to detract from the fine

The fact that they integrated IE into the OS was a deliberate plan to make IE the dominant browser. Microsoft were pushing the idea that everything would be on the web way back then, and as such they were ahead of their time, and long before decent internet connections made it viable.

No it wasn't. It was a simple step in code optimisation and enabled an enhanced user experience.

They wanted to bring the "web experience" to the Windows Desktop. This started with Windows 98SE and IE4 on Windows 98, which enabled "active desktop" features such as live feeds by simply adding a website onto your desktop. Making Windows Explorer (the file manager) and Internet Explorer (the web browser) the same program enabled this without replicating the code base. It also brought things like advanced preview features into file browsing. Treating the web as an extension of your desktop enabled a host of new features while reducing bugs and development time to a minimum.

Because of all this anti-MS crap, the benefits of all this work are now gone. You need individual apps, widgets, gadgets or whatever they're called for everything now. This duplicates existing code. It adds expense. It reduces reliability. It's a completely retarded situation. Windows would be a far superior environment if it's development hadn't been crippled by small minded bigots who don't understand what they're meddling with and the consequences of their draconian actions.

It's ironic that the HTML driven desktop with web applications is now such a fashionable idea, 15 years after MS were forced to stop developing it.

I will defer to your knowledge on that. I thought that Opera were the main complainants of this arrangement?

Netscape started it, crying because no one wanted to buy their inferior product.

Rather than developing a superior product, they went to their lawyers. It's obvious now that we have such a large choice of thriving browsers that MS's dominance had little to do with Netscape's demise.

I do remember Opera joining in with the whining at some stage, but I CBA to look up their role in it. They are at least still going, which proves they didn't entirely forget about making a good product.

At that time I was a Netscape Communicator user, so browser and mail in one IIRC. Though IE was fine, I never really used it except for Microsoft downloads which I think had to have IE to install. Though taking the legal route was a mistake.

The problem from a web developer standpoint was that:
a) Netscape and Microsoft could not even implement standard HTML, and that’s before they wanted us to develop for one platform exclusively. So they added stuff that they thought we’d like. The result was that in order to not have those foul “works best in <insert browser name here>” buttons on a web site, was that we had to double up code to ensure that all worked well in both browsers.

b) Microsoft could not get IE on a Mac to behave in the same way as IE in Windows. They were two very different beats, with IE Mac coming from the Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit who had no real contact with the rest of Microsoft (note - this problem also affected Office, Font Page, etc). IE for the Mac could not use ActiveX controls either, meaning that there was not even a cross platform facility to use these if we wanted (at the time, I was working at a web developer agency where we were pretty much MS based for servers and development).

c) Netscape and Microsoft produced their own variant of the beast that was to become JavaScript. Neither could agree on a proper DOM model, so (again), code with duplicated functionality had to be written - with browser sniffers to ensure the right code ran in the right browser. Again, Mac IE behaved slightly differently to Windows IE.

Remember - HTML is platform agnostic, and ideally all browsers should display the same results. This does not happen, even today. The issue is that Microsoft is (it certainly was) actively pushing its platform to developers, and by getting web developers to work to Internet Explorer, using their technology (.net, ASP, ActiveX, etc.) and their flavour of HTML/DHTML (they called their flavour of JavaScript “Dynamic HTML”), they were aiming to have their platform became the dominant system. Their browser, their OS, their software, their platform. By making Windows IE the go-to browser for the web, they hoped to become the sole OS and software provider.

Oh - that “web page on a desktop” was a dreadful idea. We tried it for a day, realised it was unworkable and certainly unreadable, and switched it off. I expect many users arrived at the same conclusion.

I'm unclear what you mean by "unreadable" as I never had any real trouble with it. At the time however, many computers didn't have enough memory to work it smoothly. MS were not permitted to develop it further so it never gained mass popularity. However, people did like the bells and whistles in their file browsers.

The direct result of being forced to rip the heart out of the desktop was Windows ME; their attempt to replicate the advanced features without actually using IE. We all know how that worked out.

Of course, HTML applications are everywhere now. We'd have been here over a decade ago if it wasn't for the lawyers...

Could MS not have brought these features from IE into libraries that the rest of the OS could use?

For example, Safari needs WebKit, but WebKit doesn't need Safari. So all the other places in OS X that need WebKit can still work without Safari.
It doesn't matter if you replace Safari with Firefox, Gecko doesn't take WebKits place.

You must have had a desktop with a couple of icons on it then.

But that's exactly what they did with Trident and mshtml.dll. The people complaining that they couldn't remove IE were complaining that they couldn't remove the entire thing. In your example, they would want to remove WebKit. Because it was evil.

Are you saying you covered the entire desktop with websites? That doesn't sound very sensible. I only ever used little news feeds and the like, usually on the right hand quarter of the desktop leaving plenty of room for other stuff. That was it's intended purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_E ... ve_Desktop

Although I don't like to cover my desktop in icons. I put commonly used applications in the "quick launch" tool bar, which is what it was there for.

I didn't cover it in websites, but, yes, icons - files, folders etc. . I still do. Those icons just obscure any text on the web page on the desktop.

And, really, the desktop itself is a blank space that is a background to your main focus - your applications and windows.

You're not supposed to put them on top.

Ahhh, I did not know that. I thought that the OS was directly liking to Trident within IE.
So yes, it does seem unjust.

If that was the case, then the OS should restrict where they go.