Opera vs. Microsoft: Antitrust in the EU
Opera filed an anti-trust complaint against Microsoft saying they abuse their operating system's dominance by bundling Internet Explorer, the average user just uses Internet Explorer and never even tries Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or any of the other alternatives. Well It's official now, there will be a special version of Windows 7 available in the European Union that doesn't come with the infamous Internet Explorer browser. Over the last 6 months Microsoft has lost 5% of the browser market to Firefox, and only 5% went from IE 7 to IE 8. There are quite a few people who still use IE 6 that are due for a new pc, and the people dying to upgrade their OS that recently got stuck with Vista will be getting Windows 7. Microsoft will lose the vast majority of its browser share in the European Union. In the rest of the world Google still has plans to trump Microsoft in OEM deals to package Chrome instead of IE with new PCs, but even if they don't more than 90% of internet users use Google for search, when Google starts seriously pushing Chrome, Internet Explorer will be obliterated. Currently half the users upgrading from IE go to Firefox, when Chrome actually enters the arena it'll surely scoop up even more. From what I've seen there are a lot more IE users asking me questions about Chrome than Firefox users. With the surge of computer sales that Windows 7 is gonna generate and Chrome betas just recently being released for Mac and Linux it looks like the race is revving up. Microsoft is leaving out native email and productivity apps for simply tying in their windows live service with the operating system. They're doing that to release sooner and beat Google to the punch. In the same vain Microsoft just launched Bing, what some say is their final attempt at competing with Google for search. Word on the internet street is people try Bing, check the search results with Google and then go back to Google. That doesn't say much about the quality, it's not about quality, it's about trust and familiarity. Google = Search. With YouTube, Gmail, Translate, and soon Google Wave Google is at the center of the vast majority of web diets. Still, Microsoft is pushing Bing really hard trying to grab a few %s market share, trying to grab some of the search market as it directly ties into browser market. Things are gonna get interesting,
I expect the w3c schools browser market share breakdown to see IE drop below 10% over the next year(by July 2010) to Firefox and Chrome where Safari and IE will be about even. As for the general population every website has different statistics for browser shares some show IE has 90% others show 60% and still others show less than 5%. So it's hard to use any of that as a measure, but IE is going to take a significant hit. With all these percentages though it's easy to loose sight of the fact that they represent more than 1.5 billion people currently on the internet, a number that grows by about 10 million new users every month.
