This is easy
All Moz need to do is have a very simple app that displays a static message like the one below
"Go get a proper OS"
The Mozilla Foundation has started work on a Firefox port that will run in the Windows 8 classic desktop and the tablet-friendly Metro user interfaces. Moz dev Brian Bondy, who described the project in detail on his blog, said the goal is to deliver a single browser capable of straddling the Microsoft operating system's split …
"whether or not Microsoft will actually permit rival software into the Windows 8 store that can be set as the default browser and elbow IE10 aside"
Apple may be free to ban competing browsers from their OS but I think the EU judgement that led to the browser ballot screen will prevent MS from following suit.
..............the competition authorities actually want to make complete, total and utter knobheads of themselves by allowing Microsoft to get away with exactly the same behavior that they sanctioned them for before. It would be so obvious and so grotesque that I doubt whether they would permit it - although one should obviously never say never.
I do hope Microsoft try it.
We are a bit strapped for cash in the EU. what with Vodaphone not paying it's taxes and the Greeks being bankrupt (technically). We could do with another massive fine from Microsoft to off set all the tax they don't pay by sending their profits via Ireland.
Did the ruling say "all future versions of Windows or Windows-like OSs" or did they just say Windows?
If it is the latter then MS could potentially argue that Vista, then W7, then Metro have changed the product completely so the old judgment no longer applies.
Anyway the judgments expired in May 2011.
It is thus not surprising that MS is changing as much as possible. They will have a free reign to lock down APIs and do all that naughty shit all over again.
Of course. if DOJ is still up for it they could take MS to court again. MS is however in a much better position than before. Metro can hardly be claimed to be in a dominant position and thus it will be hard for MS to be thrashed for anti-trust.
"The other is whether or not Mozilla's work will easily transfer to Windows on ARM, about which Microsoft has said very little and for which a Windows 8 Consumer Preview is not available."
They'd have to do something pretty screwed up for it not to, remember there's lots of 3rd party Firefox packages for obscure processors, these guys should have more experience with multiple targets than Microsoft (Anyone remember the failure that was NT for Alpha?).
'course that's assuming that Microsoft haven't screwed up Windows on ARM and made it horribly incompatible...
No need to worry. It's only a spoiler product:
MS Flunky: End Users all want tablets and but can't justify the extra cost of Wintel just so they can use Office.
MS Exec: Well we will have make Windows run on ARM and make MS Office work too.
MS Flunky: Will we need to do anything else?
MSExec: Who cares? We have met user expectations.
Try Add-on Compatibility Reporter which allows plugins to run even if they claim incompatibility -- you can then disable only the ones which don't work, if any. I can't vouch for it on regular builds any more but all the plugins I use work fine on the nightly build with Add-on Compatibility Reporter installen, which includes NoScript and AddBlock Plus.
yup this is a pure guess but i think MS would be forced in to allowing different browers as default. at least in the EU anyway. it would only serve to give them more bad PR at the end of the day and the inevitable law suites would bound to follow. Its a guess, but id put money on it working.
Chromium's core is webkit, which used to be KHTML, which was the rendered for the KDE project. KDE is a desktop environment for Unix, and Windows NT (hence XP, Vista, 7, 8, ...) is meant to be a Unix killer.
Firefox is based on gecko, which was the cross platform renderer for Netscape6. Internet explorer was specifically meant to kill Netscape.
Using either as the core of IE would not just be microsoft admitting that they had failed to kill Unix or Netscape (the technology, that is, since netscape the company is quite clearly dead), but actually admitting that after all these years of trying, they're still totally out-classed.
IE9 is pretty good, and certainly standards-compliant.
I don't use it - because there is no AdBlock+ for it, mostly - but I do have to test against it and it seems fine. Harmless, functional, pretty quick...
But no ABP, no NoScript, no dictionaries and no Inspect Element means I think it's got a way to go. It's a shitload better than Safari though, and it's not actively spyware like Chrome.
Play nice with firefox?
Why MUST, for example, users of [an ms-beholden time-keeping software company ] be required to log in via msie? Hopefully, if developers would NOT compel clients to use msie, nor fixate on activex, then clients using Linux or Apple systems could truly do remote-time-keeping from an Android phone, from a Linux-based laptop, or even from any OS using Opera or Chrome or Safari...
Besides, a time-keeping system is not a high-end game. Why must it be unnecessarily excessively hooked into ONE browser and ONE spreadsheet? Why cannot the data first go through a layer ANY standards-compliant browser and ANY capable spreadsheet or backend database?
Oh, wait.. marketing dollars?
If more vendors stopped doing things that made it a PITA to use non-ms browsers and behaved OS agnostic.... well, you know or can figure out the rest...