Some are even known to cause bugs and/or instability of the entire browser when used with certain other extensions. unsupported by and have nothing to do with Mozilla themselves, other than the fact that they’re made for their browser). Almost all–if not all–of the “extensions” at that site are “unofficial” (ie. Yes, I personally use a couple of the extensions and the BlueQute theme myself. In such cases, I can understand litigation as an option. BUT, when one of the competitors is a convicted monopolist (and their monopoly position is unchanged), there is no fair competition. I agree that it would be nicer for true competition to solve these problems. If you’re sick of companies litigating to solve their issues, that’s cool. Open, in the way I used it means that the spec, be it HTML, CSS, CSS2, ECMA Script or whatever, is open. This implies that they are all intimately related to open-source software and inimical to closed-source software, and I’m sure the people who started doing that were aware of this.) Opera is saying Microsoft is a monopoly and they are abusing that monopoly position. I didn’t say anything about going out of business and neither did Opera. Microsoft is a monopoly convicted of abusing their monopoly position. In fact, it might be the only true motivation Microsoft for get its act together. This is a huge problem for companies like Opera whose business depends on these standards being standard. IE7 is an improvement over 6, to be sure, but the open standards that the web depends on are still only being paid lip service. Once the market for IE was secured, Microsoft disregarded the open protocols that makes the web work and let the browser stagnate for many, many years. The dominant operating system vendor also supplies the world’s dominant web browser (remember that monopoly abuse I mentioned?). The reason the internet works is because it is based on open protocols. This is not the same as Opera not supporting Silverlight or WMV. You’re missing (or willfully ignoring) a really big point: Microsoft is a monopoly that has been tried and convicted of abusing that monopoly position (remember, it’s not illegal to have dominant market share it’s what they do from that position that is).
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