The European Union Decision Might Be Stupid, But Heart & Minds Are in the Right Place

Over the last few days, I have read many articles, from entities on 3 continents, about the European Union and its (possible) decision to make Microsoft deliver Windows 7 with several browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

The kneejerk idiots state that if these four are considered for inclusion, why should not (put your named, small market share browser here) also be included.

Perhaps they should be, but in the perfect world, that we are not part of, disc space, and patience, would be infinite; however, we know they are not.

the big three, other than Internet Exploder, but you know what happened to the other ‘big 3′

Certainly the EU wants to make things fair. Certainly, it would be really great to be able to make Microsoft exclude Internet Exploder 8® from the distribution, but then we have a real problem, don’t we?

While I favor the inclusion of the largest ones, as there will certainly be enough room on the DVD for them, perhaps the best way would be to force the purveyors of those browsers to pay Microsoft a fair price for the inclusion of the browser’s inclusion, on a separate CD. That way, all the browsers that have a vocal group of supporters would know what they must do to be included.

On the other hand, it could be as simple as the installation of pointers to the download locations of those browsers, same as the way Windows 95 included pointers to the ISPs who were large at the time it was released.

What is important is not to make life difficult for Microsoft, it is simply important to make that company acknowledge publicly that other, perhaps better, browsers are available to the users of the operating system.

As I think about it, perhaps the EU should have Microsoft reserve some space on their FTP servers, for the most recent copy of the browsers in question, that way, no CD pressing charges would be incurred, and users would also be assured of getting the unadulterated stuff, which has always been one of Microsoft’s expressed concerns.

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