The EU and others even in our own USA, mostly Libs, have an agenda to destroy the free market system. Chipping away a little piece at a time. Remember the days before MS? Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Curtis Sinclair and more. No standards and one system to the next could not communicate or even share files with each other. Like it or not MS (with Apple technology) came up with windows and made it possible to get where we are now on a global level. And as has already been mentioned, Firefox and Google Chrome can easily be downloaded and used instead. I use them all depending on what I want to do or where I want to go on the web.
I think I’ll go download the new IE8 beta and give it a spin on Al Gore’s internet thingy! :-)
Um, I clearly remember my TRS-80 CoCo communicating with a DEC-10, and other unlike machines. CompuServe, my college campus... This was before M$.
I can assure you standards did exist before M$. They had to to some extent. Now in the area of LAN, there was no clearly dominate topology and/or protocol for some time. And back before Ethernet and TCP/IP became dominate, one company made a lot of money by being able to accommodate and integrate all those differing networks; communicate, share files and print services from a heterogeneous mix of machines and networks: Novell.