It appears the European Commission and Microsoft are close to an agreement in the web browser-bundling antitrust case. I reported last week in the 4sysops news section that there probably will be no Windows 7 E without Internet Explorer in Europe. Instead, Microsoft will offer a Ballot Screen that allows users to choose a web browser. The Ballot Screen will also be displayed on already installed Windows XP and Windows Vista computers. This article summarizes the most important facts about the Ballot Screen.

Obviously, Windows 7 without a browser would have meant too much hassle for PC manufacturers, software vendors, and customers. It is also possible that the European Commission wouldn’t have accepted Microsoft’s proposal to deliver Windows 7 in Europe without any web browser. I have already outlined my view about this bizarre antitrust case before. I think Microsoft made the right decision, not because we need more competition in the browser market, but because a special European Windows 7 edition would have caused too much trouble. I am now waiting until Symantec & Co. will want a Ballot Screen for desktop firewalls, antimalware software, backup software, etc.

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It was wise of Google to wait on the announcement of Chrome OS until the Michael Jackson funeral was over. Otherwise, the web might have collapsed. On the other hand, I wonder what took them so long to finally release their own Linux distro for PCs. Many had expected this already years ago.

Yes, I know, it will probably be a Linux distribution that is different compared to the countless other Linux operating systems. The post at Google’s weblog lets us only guess what this Chrome OS could look like. I think this is the key paragraph:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

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I suppose, you caught the news that Firefox 3.5 is now available. I skimmed over a few news sites to get an idea about its new features. Once again, I was shocked by the lack of objectivity in our Western media. All sites I have read were praising Firefox 3.5 as if the Mozilla guys had just reinvented the Web (like Opera).

Take the article at Channel Web as an example. The author names five features that are reason enough to say Firefox 3.5 rocks. One is an extension of the “awesome bar” that allows you to search in your bookmarks. Now, seriously, is this really a feature that rocks?? I don’t think you need a PhD in psychology to analyze this behavior. The author didn’t just want to write a review about Firefox 3.5; he wanted to belong to the big, Firefox-praising community. Thus, she was desperately trying to find reasons that could support her faulty claim.

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Usually, I ignore the battles between the European Commission (EC) and Microsoft because I can’t take this struggle for “more competition” seriously anymore. But the latest developments are just too bizarre, so I can’t resist sharing my opinion.

You’ve probably heard that the EC believes that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows 7 is against European law. I don’t know this law, and I am not really interested in it. However, if it is really true that it is against the law for a company to decide what kind of features a software product can have, then there is obviously something wrong with this law. To escape insane fines, Microsoft has decided to ship Windows 7 in Europe without Internet Explorer. Manufacturers and customers will have the option to install Internet Explorer. All Windows 7 editions sold in the European Union will have an “E” at the end of the product name.

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In my last post I covered the arguments usually heard when people compare Internet Explorer and Firefox. From my perspective however, other factors have to be considered when comparing the two vis-a-vis the corporate environment. I outlined these issues in my previous posts, which dealt with earlier versions of the two programs. For this article, I reviewed the situation, and I must admit I was a little surprised that not much has changed. It appears that the guys and gals at Mozilla are not really interested in giving Firefox a chance in corporate networks.

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This is the third time I have addressed the issue of Firefox vs. Internet Explorer on this blog. About three years ago, I compared Firefox 1.0 to Internet Explorer 6, and a few months later I wrote about Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7. Since Firefox 3.0 has already been out for some time, and Internet Explorer 8 is about to be released, it is time to check on what has changed. Considering Firefox’ growing popularity, and the fact that it will be possible to disable Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7, many Windows administrators will toy with the idea of finally getting rid of IE. In this post, I will cover some of the most commonly discussed criteria relating to the IE vs. Firefox issue. In my next article, I will cover network-related arguments.

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One of the first things I usually do when I install a new Windows Server in a test environment, is to turn off IE Enhanced Security Configuration (IE ESC). I am talking about this little prompts that get on your nerves whenever you open a website in Internet Explorer on a Windows Server. I described how to disable IE ESC in Windows Server 2003 a while back. Since it is one of the popular articles here on 4syosps and because the procedure is different on Windows Server 2008, I decided to post a follow-up to save you from this constant security prompts.

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NETWORWORLD has a review about Niccholas Carrs’s new book where he argues that the IT department is dead. Carr is known for his provocative views. However, you often hear similar assertions about the impact of cloud computing these days. Usually, they are about the showdown between Google and Microsoft. Many think that Google can replace applications on the Windows desktop with their web-based applications. We are living in a fast moving world. So it can’t be wrong to listen to these assertions every once in a while.

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Microsoft just released a new version of their IE7 deployment paper. The document has 156 pages. So you can imagine that IE7 deployment can get tricky. However, for the experienced admin many of the things discussed in it will be quite familiar. Nevertheless, it might be a useful reference if you run into problems. The other question is if you need to deploy IE7 if you haven’t done it yet.

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Todd Bishop blogged about Steve Ballmer’s recent statements concerning the competition between Microsoft and Google. Bishop gave an assessment I’ve read so often since Microsoft’s announcement of Office Live Workspace. Typically expressions such as “online editing” or “online collaboration” are mentioned then. And they would usually say that Google does it but Microsoft does not. I never understood what they are talking about. Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

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Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft’s response to Adobe’s Flash, has been released. I’ve read a couple of articles about Silverlight and also about AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) recently. It seems to me that these new technologies have the capability to revolutionize the way we work with net based applications. In my view, they could even mean the end of traditional Web applications.

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Microsoft published a white paper which might be of interest to those who did not yet decide to deploy Internet Explorer 7. Actually, I am one of them. Some months ago, I posted an article where I recommended not deploying IE7 before 2007. Well, it is already end of March and I am still not convinced.

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Microsoft published the Internet Explorer 7 Deployment Guide, a 67 page Word document, discussing how to plan and carry out IE7 deployment. I just skimmed over the document, but it seems to me that more things have to be considered than what I thought before.

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Every year or so, I search for a new way to highlight and annotate text in Web pages. As an IT professional, I am a knowledge worker. So I don’t just read information on Web pages, I work with them. Since Web browsers only allow you to read Web pages, I often convert the more important ones to a PDF and work with them in Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the Reader). There, I can highlight text, create annotations, and search through all my documents, annotations, and highlighted text with ease. However, this method has become obsolete since I found Diigo. Diigo is the most powerful social bookmarking service I’ve ever seen. It has many features and I will introduce some of them in this post.

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Some time ago, I wrote an article where I compared the capabilities of Firefox with Internet Explorer in a corporate environment. My conclusion was that Firefox is no rival to IE in this field. I planned to check the situation again after Firefox 2.0 and IE7 came out, but a NetworkWorld article convinced me that it is not worth the time. It seems that the situation is pretty much the same.

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