Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

I see were back to Artificial Technical Limitations again Microsoft. You don't learn do you? I'm sure you will all be hearing from the EU again.

Lawyers, start your engines!

Amazing. Just when I was actually starting to like MS again (after decades agin), they fall back on their old bad ways.

The antitrust lawyers will have a field day with this, MS will be stomped on from on high in the US and European courts, and end up paying a fortune and opening out the OS again, just as happened with the Windows Browser Wars.

It is Profoundly Not Clever. MS's middle market (desktop and laptop PCs, particularly in business) is under a major squeeze from Android, iOS and Mac OS devices, and they are very late to the table, or rather the tablet. If Microsoft is to reinvigorate its market, and get back into a race that's in danger of leaving MS in its dust, it absolutely must operate as open and inclusive as possible, else developers will simply deploy their limited resources where they're more profitably employed - and buyers will buy devices that they have the widest scope for adapting to their own needs.

Time for a change at the top at MSFT, before they squander the rest of their share value. Their market capitalisation's been on a slow slide over the past ten years, in marked comparison to Apple and (since 2004) Google - and a huge new antitrust exposure won't help things at all.

Whilst I have time for Mozilla (mainly use FF) they are bleating on for no reason. They roll over and take one from Apple when they don't allow another browser on iOS but then bitch about a small portion of prospective Win 8 RT users. To be honest I think MS regret having to provide the classic desktop with Win8RT but have had to as there is just so much to Metroise.

We shall see...

How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

MS could have made the WOA platform as open as Wintel and even thrown in x86 emulation since most Wintel programs just sit there in an event loop waiting for the user to click something. Instead they assume that on ARM == tablet, make Metro the only option as a UI, and lock it down to within an inch of its life and as a result locked themselves out of any fledgling ARM latop/desktop market.

Not content with that they also manage to pollute the Wintel version with Metro and bring confusion to the Wintel API.

MS have never known how to split things up, it's all a huge interconnected mess, just look in the C:\Windows directory...

Losing faith in The Register...

Damn, that's some SHIT editing el reg - comments prior to this point out the obvious errors.

If it wasn't for the Paris Hilton angle, I would've left ages ago and header on over to ... erm, damn, slashdot?

I take it all back El Reg, I'm not losing faith in you, but faith in my taste.

Bang bang bang

Ahhh the sound of more nails being driven into the coffin of Windows 8

And if, as mentioned above, they are just copying Apple, we should expect the lawyers to be kept busy and wealthy for a few more years.

If this were Apple...

... everyone would be strangely OK with it.

I still don't see Gecko-based browsers on iOS but, curiously, nobody is outraged by that.

An operating system is what it's creators want it to be

Why do people think that it is a god given right to have equal access to platforms created by Microsoft and Apple. These are commercial entities and they have created operating systems to make money - for no other reason. We live in a free society - which means any person or collection of persons, are able to create a product and take it to market. Anyone who disagrees with this premise is arguing against one of the fundamentals of capitalism.

One can only assume those people are unemployed or work for the public sector because anyone who has a job for a business is really a hypocrite if they think that Microsoft or Apple are not entitled to leverage competitive advantage by using the products they themselves create. At a nuts and bolts level, this is all about senior individuals in a job making decisions about their own products to add best value to their company and make a profit - doing this is their commercial duty to their shareholders and it is their ethical duty to the staff that depend on their decisions to provide the foundations on which they can build their careers. Of course Microsoft and Apple would like to own the browser on their platform. Sony own the browser built into the Playstation - I don't see a choice of Chrome or Mozilla there - and why should there be: Playstation is owned by Sony.

I would argue that over time, the browser will disappear and merge into the operating system. The mainstream browsers should all be much of a muchness when we get to IE10. And in most people's mind they won't give 2 hoots what browser they are using to access the web. They'll only be concerned with which device they'll be using when they access it. I expect vendors of any operating system to follow suit. Apple have blurred the lines and a sharp legal mind will soon easily argue that the browser is now necessarily part of the operating system.

Apple will easily lock users in to Safari as they surround it with more cloud based services.

Microsoft will do the same with IE. And why shouldn't they - we pay them to write operating systems, and we expect their operating systems to continue to evolve with the Internet. The shift to the cloud is a natural part of this. Making the browser transparent is a huge part of providing intuitive and secure access to the web while acknowledging that for most people, accessing the web is why they buy a computer now.

So any vendor should be entitled to sell a computer with a built in operating system that provides great web access out of the box, and having invested a great deal of money developing that operating system they naturally want to protect their investment by giving their own browser a significant advantage.

Sorry but I've seen the future - and Mozilla and Firefox did not exist and everyone was using computers that looked like giant iPhones.