Microsoft To Offer Europeans A Choice

Story from Information Week

Microsoft and the European Union announced an agreement Wednesday under which the software maker will provide European PC users a choice of browsers to run on the Windows operating system under a trial program.

The company typically configures its own Internet Explorer as the default browser for Windows. If the trial passes muster, Microsoft will be bound by the agreement's terms for the next five years.

The accord is meant to settle claims by European authorities that Microsoft's bundling of Explorer with Windows stifles competition in the browser market and creates an unfair playing field for rivals like Google and Mozilla.

"We welcome today's announcement by the European Commission to move forward with formal market testing of Microsoft's proposal relating to Web browser choice in Europe," said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith, in a statement.

Under the plan, Microsoft will provide Windows users with a so-called "ballot screen" that will provide information about alternatives to Explorer, such as Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox, and others, and allow them to activate the browser of their choice.

The ballot screen will come pre-installed on new Windows 7 computers and pushed to older systems running Vista or Windows XP through Microsoft's Windows Update server.

"The Commissions' concern has been that PC users should have an effective and unbiased choice between Internet Explorer and competing Web browsers to ensure competition on the merits and to allow consumers to benefit from technical developments and innovation both on the Web browser market an on related markets, such a Web-based applications," EU officials said in a statement.

Microsoft and European trustbusters have butted heads numerous times previously. Last year, the EC hit the company with a record $1.35 billion antitrust fine, claiming that Microsoft failed to make available to rivals documentation needed to create products that are interoperable with Windows.

"Today's decision is a significant step toward closing a decade-long chapter of competition law concerns in Europe," said Smith.

With Chrome, Google's Not Fighting The Last Browser War

It's trying to shift the focus to running Web applications, not viewing pages

Google's release of its open source Chrome browser at high noon on Sept. 2 promises to bring a new dimension to the browser wars, which have been smoldering lately even as Mozilla released Firefox 3 andMicrosoft released the beta of Internet Explorer 8.

The beta version of Chrome presents a dilemma to business IT teams. Features like its crash-resistant "sandbox" approach to tabs point to the future of Web-centric desktops. But Google isn't talking about administrative tools to make it practical in an enterprise; the browser works only on Windows XP/Vista, though Mac and Linux versions are promised; and the security advances in Chrome's architecture don't extend to rich Internet applications, or RIAs, that use Java, Flash, and Silverlight plug-ins, which are proliferating in the corporate world.

Bottom line: Chrome is beta software that remains a work in progress, though it has enough interesting features to make it suitable for more adventurous business IT pilot projects. For most employees, it could just be one more thing that makes their home computers cooler than the ones at work.

Why is Google entering the already-crowded browser market? Because its future is directly tied to the continued proliferation of Web apps, which require improvements in browsers at a faster pace than the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation can afford, or that Microsoft, with its stake in licensed software, shows an interest in driving. Google is impatient to give people better access to its massive data centers and believes it needs to build a browser from scratch with the goal of shifting the focus to running applications, not just displaying pages.

Businesses are demanding more from their browsers because of the ever-growing number of Web apps. For those Salesforce.com customers who "live in the app," Chrome's isolated sandbox approach--which keeps one business app from dragging down others' performance--is appealing, says Adam Gross, VP of Salesforce developer marketing. "It speaks to a world not about Web sites you visit once, but apps like Salesforce or Gmail that you live in all day, every day," Gross says.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet/Zoho, the company behind the Zoho Web suite, which has word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases, also touts Chrome's Google Gears technology, which makes online applications available offline. The Chrome team implemented this concept with a multiprocessing architecture similar to that in Microsoft's recent IE8 beta, which provides the same isolation capabilities in the browser that are found in modern operating systems.

A MOBILE PLATFORM?

One of Chrome's greatest impacts could come from the fact that it uses the WebKit rendering engine, which also will be in Google's upcoming Android phone browser. A framework that lets programmers design browsers that work roughly the same on PCs and on handheld devices, WebKit is the rendering engine for Apple's Safari Web browser and a slew of mobile phones, including the iPhone. By putting Chrome on PCs and WebKit on Android phones, Google makes it more likely that developers will start building truly cross-platform applications that work equally well on desktops and mobile devices. Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal predicts Chrome's uptake "will be much more gradual and slow than most suppose and more likely in the mobile browser space than in the desktop one."


Forrester's Sheri McLeish agrees that businesses will be slow to support Chrome, since browser changes are a low priority, but she says Chrome is likely to enter companies the way instant messaging did: under IT's radar.

Cloud computing enthusiasts, including blogger Sam Johnston, were quick to crown Chrome, alongside Linux and cloud-based storage, as a "full-blown Cloud Operating System." But a modern operating system for general-purpose computing is responsible for the management and coordination of thousands of interrelated activities on a desktop PC--out-of-the-box hosting of boatloads of applications, management of physical and virtual resources, disk access and file systems, and graphics rendering, not to mention device drivers for printing, networking, media playback, and thousands of input devices.

"No, I would not call Chrome the operating system of Web apps," said Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the Chrome launch demo. "I think it is a very fast engine to run Web apps. With Chrome, we will be able to bridge the divide. We will be able to do more and more online. You will be able to access your work from an Internet cafe and get all those benefits."

Chrome's sure to get more business friendly in coming versions. While it came out with a license agreement saying Google could use any content posted through the browser, Google quickly dubbed that a mistake it would fix. But the terms also let Google place advertising however it sees fit. Enterprise customers would want to examine both these clauses.

On the security front, Chrome differs from other browser architectures by isolating the browser's kernel from the rendering engine, making it better able to thwart certain types of attacks that can exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in the rendering engine. But those advances don't protect RIAs in this release.

Google hasn't proved it can deliver a blockbuster enterprise product. If it eventually does so with Chrome, employees will be able to exploit a platform with rich possibilities for Web, desktop, and mobile enterprise applications. Chrome is more than just an attempt by Google to win yesterday's high-noon browser shootout. Google's goal is nothing less than making the Web faster, safer, and easier to use. Thanks to some pretty sophisticated open source technology, it's going to win that one.

By: Roger Smith
Information Week; September 8, 2008