I don’t see a problem with Microsoft (or Apple or any other OS creator) including a complimentary convenience application with their OS as long as they don’t prevent 3rd party programs from being available as alternatives, and as long as I’m not forced to use their built-in program. IE/Edge being part of Windows means I can use it to download Firefox, make it my default browser, then ignore IE.
I think a lot of it has to do with the time frame we’re looking at. In 1997-1999, the browser wasn’t quite as essential as they are now. I remember having a Windows 95 OSR 2 CD, for example. But with FAT file systems, something like chkdsk was absolutely necessary, and a defragger was a very good idea, especially if you used a lot of virtual memory and didn’t have an excess of disk space.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft “integrated” that too, requiring an ActiveX browser (i.e. Internet Explorer at that time) to update Windows, so you had to have IE to update Windows.
Keep in mind, these were the days when a website might look significantly different on one browser vs the rest. I recall having a debate with my boss over why our online inventory portal looked good in IE, and not nearly so good in Netscape/Mozilla (this was about 2001), and the answer was that the different browsers handled things like cascading style sheets differently. He didn’t understand that things were actually dependent on the browser (and in some cases, the version) that you were using, and that we couldn’t have our site be as flashy as he wanted, and look as good as he wanted in all browsers at once, without having to maintain several versions of the site.
But from a legal perspective, what makes a browser non-essential but a defragger essential?
I remember that. Is that what the frames/no frames thing was?
One aspect I have not seen discussed in this thread is the Web programming model.
In the 1990s, there was no obvious way to make an interactive Web site. You had a mix of technologies (Perl, PHP, etc.) and uneven browser support. There was a hunger for a platform that would allow e-commerce and online media to finally take off.
Microsoft’s apparent intention was to control both the desktop and the server. If most people were using Internet Explorer, site operators would be encouraged to offer advanced functionality through technologies such as ActiveX, which would imply that the servers were Windows-based. Once enough Web sites offered their advanced functionality only through ActiveX, which worked mostly on Internet Explorer, this would give users a reason to use Windows rather than Mac or OS/2 or Linux. And so on.
If people started using other browsers such as Netscape, more open technologies (such as Java and Flash and JavaScript) could become dominant. If Internet Explorer could leverage some undocumented aspects of Windows to offer better performance or unique features, Microsoft could prevent those other browsers from gaining market share.
Of course it didn’t turn out that way historically, lawsuit or not; but the lawsuit did call attention to the incestuous relationship between the OS and application groups at Microsoft, which may have made them play nice®.
Among other things I do web design (and have done so for a long time). Frame sets were a big problem but there was more to it. “Back in the day” a standard web site was a giant table, think of a spreadsheet where all the parts of a page were in cells. If you wanted a picture to the right of a block of text, you put the picture in one cell and text in another. Different browsers had different ideas of how cells should be laid out, how big they were, etc. What lined up perfectly in IE was crooked in Netscape, or looked different in Windows or on a Mac.
These days we use CSS code which is so much better. If you want a picture to the right of the text, you pretty much just say to put it to the right. HTML 5 and CSS 3 have very well-defined behaviors most modern browsers will treat identically. What was the Wild West 15-20 years ago is more codified and standardized now.
But it’s still not perfect. Pages are still going to look different in different browsers, or different versions of the same browser, or different OSes, or different kinds of devices. You now have to worry about how your page looks and behaves on a smart phone, or web-capable TV.
The good thing is that we designers no longer fight against this and instead embrace it. CSS lets you pick different things to fall back on. You can define a paragraph’s font to be Arial but set it so that if the browser doesn’t support that font that it switches to any sans-serif font instead. A site can redirect you to a mobile version of the page if you are on a smart phone. And so on. So it still happens but it’s no longer a problem.
So why the hell does every site want you to install an app on your iOS device to access their content?
Because the browser on a mobile device is more limited than that on a desktop or laptop, and they’ve created mobile apps designed to give you features that your browser won’t. That’s the theory at least.
Because a browser isn’t actually required to do updates. They deliberately designed it to require a web browser. It no longer does, BTW.*
The defrag utility is something that runs on your system in order to keep it running properly. In Windows, it runs every week or so. It’s not an app but a service.
It also does not directly compete with anything. It has the bare minimum of functionality required. Internet Explorer was a fully featured web browser. It was in direct competition with Netscape.
*I know people who uninstalled Edge. The HTML rendering system is separate.
Because in a browser your competition is one click away. But with a dedicated app the lock-in is much more secure.
Nothing you do on the Bank of America iOS app will ever tell you that Chase is having a sale on car loans. But if you’re Googling/Binging to find BofA’s website then you might be shown Chase’s ads. Which does not make BofA happy.
The difference between today and back then is the cloud and cloud-like apps. Search is something done on the search engine’s servers, not on your computer. If the browser is the gateway to the cloud, then the browser can influence what you use. Mozilla signed some sort of deal with Yahoo and tries to make Yahoo the default search engine. Easy enough to fix, but still…
Google docs is another cloud app. If they were 100% compatible with Office you could see some issues. (I don’t use it - I use Open Office/Libre Office when possible.)
Basically, cloud based apps make barrier to entry almost nothing, and what counts is quality, cost, and adherence to de facto standards.
So, the advantage Google could get from search engine dominance would be to direct search users to their home page and from there to a Docs link. Not everything but something.
Now, sure. But it was simply a factory-installed application in Win 3.xx and 95.
In other words, the shift to cloud-based productivity apps like Office 365 and Google Docs takes away any OS-based leverage that Microsoft retained, and shifts it to Google, since they’re more or less the linchpin in a lot of internet use (most everyone searches for something at some point, after all)?
If Microsoft is suing Google over that, it’s hysterical and nearly the most hypocritical thing I’ve seen in a while. (SW Airlines shrilly opposing high speed rail in Texas takes the cake though, after railing against the Wright Amendment and American Airlines as being anti-competitive for decades).
At the time Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on the desktop OS. This was not illegal because it was considered just a consequence of market preference. That is, everybody bought Windows because everybody wanted it. That was sort of a stretch, but close enough that Microsoft was safe on that issue.
However, there is antitrust law that says you can’t use a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another area, and that’s what Microsoft was accused of doing with IE. It came pre-installed on Windows, and for a long time it couldn’t even be uninstalled. For a case in point, AOL (back when it was a big deal) had IE as their default browser, even after they bought and owned Netscape. Why? Because Microsoft gave AOL a default icon on the Windows desktop. That quid-pro-quo was an example of using monopoly power to do harm to the market.