Opera’s complaint against Microsoft is viewed as bad timing by some, and is certainly nothing new. Microsoft has been attacked many times over the years for bundling their proprietary web browser Internet Explorer with their operating system (Windows). They have also been attacked countless times by web developers for having the least standards-compliant browser on the market.
Have these constant complaints helped? Maybe a little bit in the case of the latter complaint. IE 7 is better, and many hope that IE 8 will be much better.
I’ll believe it when I see it. And I don’t believe the MS will ever un-bundle Windows with IE. This means that virtually all web users use IE – the least standards-compliant browser – by default. So I’ll keep having to teach people not to use pixels as their unit of measurement for font size; that I’ll keep having to explain the box model to people who should never need to understand it so that they can deal with browser discrepancies; and that I’ll keep having to explain why creating web pages by saving Word documents as HTML is a bad idea. Well, OK, that last thing is as much Word’s fault as it is IE’s.
I support Opera’s complaint.
