“[...] how Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its browser, Internet Explorer, to the Windows operating system and by hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards. Opera has requested the Commission to take the necessary actions to compel Microsoft to give consumers a real choice and to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer.”

“Opera requests the Commission to implement two remedies to Microsoft’s abusive actions. First, it requests the Commission to obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop. Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities. The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” strategy. Microsoft’s unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain, and technologically inferior and that can even expose users to security risks.”

The funny thing is that Apple bundles Safari with Mac OS X and no one complains about that. I think that’s mainly because the Apple guys are working hard to ensure it supports the standards well. So from the two points above in the Opera press release I find the requirement for Microsoft to follow the standards the most important.

-silence-

Yes, I am as amazed as you about this. I mean, who would have figured that after IE6 and IE7 we would get an IE8? Yes, I am being sarcastic.

Of course we can only hope they will finally ditch their proprietary muck and start supporting CSS 2.1 better. Heck, maybe we can even see some MathML support. Because in related and definitely more exciting news Opera’s 9.5 beta gained MathML support. It is not fully implemented yet, but they’re actively asking people to provide results. I am secretly wishing for a web developer uprising that will enforce websites using standards and limit the workaround hacks.

During all this I encountered a lovely problem with Internet Explorer and its support for PNG, namely that it is mucking around with the gamma setting, regardless of what the PNG specifies. (A even more detailed background is available in the form of Henri Sivonen’s excellent article on the matter.)

So right now I am stripping the gamma (gAMA) header from my PNGs in order to have it working across most browsers (it seems Safari 1.3 has issues with PNGs on a lot of fronts).
So in short: no matter what the Internet Explorer team fixes, they seem to screw up in other magnificent ways and this is what sets them so apart from, say, the Opera team. Instead of not taking blame the Opera team actively ask people to report problems back so that they can see if it is a real problem with their product.

The amount of explorer.exe and media player hangs I’ve experienced since I installed this beta 2 preview is just insane. Once I uninstalled IE 7 everything was working without any problems at all.

You can uninstall as follows (taken from Quirks Blog): go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel, be sure to check ‘Show updates’, and the IE 7 beta will appear as the final Windows update.

Once and for all people: the Internet has standards. That Microsoft choses not to play nice with this is not the fault of the people developing sites that do play nice with standards.

Instead, bother Microsoft to fix their browser’s dumb behaviour.