Norway’s Opera Software has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft with the European Commission, claiming the giant is abusing its dominant position in browsers to gain control of the mobile internet sector. Whereas Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has an unassailable position on the PC, it has been under more pressure in the mobile world, where Opera mainly thrives, supported by partners like Nokia and Symbian ‘ also rarely friends of Microsoft and its Windows Mobile ambitions.
According to Opera, Microsoft is abusing its market position by selling its Windows operating system together with IE, and also by failing to implement widely supported web standards in IE, so that non-Microsoft browsers cannot view web pages written for IE effectively.
“We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera, which is asking the EC’s competition division to make Microsoft unbundle IE from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers preinstalled on the desktop. It also wants the Commission to rule that Microsoft should follow fundamental and open web standards accepted by the web authoring communities.
That last part if perhaps the most important, because many financial web sites and those offered by major telecommunication operators which are partners of Microsoft, are guilty of not working with Opera, leading to everyone having to load Internet Explorer once in a while even if it’s not their chosen browser.
Opera has perhaps been encouraged by the European Court of Justice’s ruling in September that Microsoft had abused its market position by selling Windows with Microsoft’s media player, and by not allowing rivals fair access to key codes which would have allowed their products to work effectively with Windows server.
“In our eyes, it is clear that the argumentation in that case should also apply to Explorer. We feel that we’ve got an important precedent set that we can use in this case,” Opera said.
Microsoft denied all claims and said it would not willingly unbundle IE from Windows. “We believe the inclusion of the (IE) browser into the operating system benefits consumers, and that consumers and PC manufacturers are already free to choose to use any browsers they wish,” a Microsoft representative said. “Internet Explorer has been an integral part of the Windows operating system for over a decade and supports a wide range of web standards.”
Opera gained a tiny market share on the PC, but has fared far better in the mobile and embedded worlds including as an IPTV browser, and recently has been partnering with key chipmakers to marry its browser to their handset architectures. In May it announced a software development kit (SDK), codeveloped with Texas Instruments, for the latter’s DaVinci platform for streaming media devices; and more recently it also added Freescale. Using the Opera browser, whose surrounding technologies are increasingly focused on web 2.0 techniques such as widgets, delivers a higher level of customization than most alternatives. This is increasingly important to service providers of all kinds as they seek differentiation for their multimedia offerings.
Meanwhile, open source organization Mozilla is stepping up efforts to make its Firefox browser dominant on the mobile platform. Already supported by Intel for the UMPC (UltraMobile PC) platform, Mozilla now plans to release a mobile version of its software early next year, geared to cellphones. Like Opera, it plans to move early to exploit the increases in memory and performance in high end phones, which will support better browsing and multimedia web services ‘ and get into this space before Google and Microsoft.
Mozilla said: ‘Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach.’