Dr Aitchison,

You are in the EU.  In the EU, Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly 
and more than simple money damages (cost of doing business that merely 
is passed onto customers with a profit margin markup).  As a result, in 
the EU Microsoft Windows may not be licensed for fee ("sold") with only 
MS Internet Explorer installed, but instead allowing the user/installer 
to have a choice of end-user browser application.

Moreover, it is extremely unusual in my experience to find commercial 
(let alone government or non-profit) URLs from the EU that recommend or 
tacitly require MS Internet Explorer and will not display properly in 
other browsers -- this MS only dependence is still too common in the USA.

However, in the USA, most desktop workstations either are under monopoly 
software or Mac OS X, with the monopoly having a large segment.  Most MS 
Win users in the USA have and use MS Inet Exp because the USA does not 
force MS not to install MS Inet Exp by default, and are more or less 
fully captive to the monopoly (not even using OpenOffice).

On my own machines, I have Firefox, its sibling Seamonkey, Konqueror, 
and Opera.  Using Virtualbox running (currently) a MS Win XP Pro guest, 
I have MS Internet Explorer more or less current, and under Linux, I use 
Crossover (supported Wine) to run an obsolete MS Inet Exp (current, 
latest MS software does not always work with Wine).  I keep these both 
for reference and to access MS only sites.

It is reassuring to read that in the EU, the monopoly sanctions against 
MS are working to some extent, with actual market penetration of 
competitors.

Yasha Karant

On 06/22/2011 12:30 AM, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jun 2011, Phong Nguyen wrote:
>
>> Mozilla has committed to a six-week rapid-release schedule starting
>> with Firefox 5; Firefox 6 is schedule for release on August 16.
>>
>> More details here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease
>
> In particular
> As part of the faster cadence, FF5.0 automatically EOL's
> when FF6.0 is released with users getting silent updates.
> so somewhere around mid August FF5 will be retired and users assumed
> to be on FF6. They recognize that FF3 and FF4 users are entitled
> to much more notice of end of line.
>
> I see a substantial upswing in corporate use of Opera
> (konqueror too ?).
>