Microsoft's redesigned MSN hit the high notes when the Opera
browser tried to get in
Last week I was writing about the toothlessness of the proposed
final agreement between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice
(DoJ). Just why it is so ineffectual has been made only too clear
by a recent sequence of events.
Naively, you might expect Microsoft to be on its best behaviour at
a time when the US courts are about to hand down a condign
punishment for past misdeeds. But not a bit of it. At just the
moment when it was hashing out the tepid final agreement with the
DoJ in which it roughly promised not to engage in its earlier
anti-competitive activities, Microsoft has been trying out a new
one.
The story began with yet another redesign of its
MSN portal. Through
relentless and presumably costly marketing, this has become one of
the more popular destinations on the Web.
So Microsoft's decision effectively to block access to some rival
browsers was provocative, to say the least. For here, it seemed,
was the world's most powerful software company attempting to use
its online muscle to force users to convert to Internet
Explorer.
Not surprisingly, many of those users were deeply unhappy. They
made their feelings known and Microsoft seemed to respond (see, for
example, the comments from MSN's director of marketing,
Bob Visse).
However, Opera, one of the companies whose browser was being
blocked, proceeded to poke serious holes in his
comments.
As it points out, Visse's statements that Microsoft had erroneously
classified some browsers like Opera as "unknown", was untrue.
One of the interesting features of Opera is that it can masquerade
as different browsers. When it pretended to be Internet Explorer,
it gained access to MSN; but in its native Opera form, it was
blocked. Clearly, MSN was actively watching out for browsers that
identified themselves as Opera.
Visse also tried to blame these other browsers for not following
the World Wide Web Consortium's standards, implying that it was
their own fault if they could not read the MSN pages.
Unfortunately, as Opera points out in its press release, the lie to
this argument is given by the fact that when the MSN opening page
at
www.msn.com/ is run
through the W3C's own
official validator,
it fails miserably.
Moreover, just to rub salt in the wound, Opera has put together a
press release written in the latest
XHTML
form of HTML, and points out that Internet Explorer is incapable of
displaying this correctly - unlike the Opera browser.
Although this may seem much ado about nothing, there are some
important issues at stake. One is whether these moves were a
deliberate act of kite-flying, a testing of the waters to see
whether anyone cared. If it were, this would be serious, since it
would suggest that Microsoft is keen to increase Internet
Explorer's already dominant market share in every way possible,
including some dubious ones.
An alternative explanation is that some coders within Microsoft did
this off their own bat. This is perhaps the least sinister
explanation, but even here there are worrying aspects, because it
suggests that the Microsoft management is unable to control its own
cowboy programmers. This, in its turn, is highly problematic for
users since it would mean that all kinds of backdoors and security
weaknesses could be left in the code by Microsoft personnel who
might one day exploit them for their own, unofficial
purposes.
The other important point that this whole episode underlines is the
rise of Opera as the "other" browser. Just as Microsoft's
increasingly virulent attacks on GNU/Linux and Apache marked the
arrival of the open source, so MSN's anti-Opera shenanigans
indicates that Microsoft now sees it as a serious threat.
Given that the new version 6.0 of
Opera
is even better than its predecessors, and addresses most of the
previous deficiencies of that product, this threat can only
grow.
Next week: Amazon revisited