Wow honestly this whole thing is just retarded...

If I was Ballmer I would just play hardball. MS will no longer sell new products in Europe unless it accepts the software as is. Europe would not even call his bluff. This is monkeyman Steve they would be talking to...

I personally don't use the Internet Explorer, but I appreciate it very much that it comes pre-installed with every version of Windows.

Another stupid move by the EU IMO.

And of course, Apple continues to have its own set of rules applied to it.

Stupid decision.

I hope this is changed....

Also the opera CEO sounded like a little kid in my mind. "finally some market share, yay!"

Unless they force the competition to do the same (which they aren't) I will not support this.

I have 0 problems with companies bundling their products together. It is their product after all. I mean whats next the EU forces Nintendo to include EA sports titles with every wii along with wii sports? Its just stupid.

Wait a sec here. If M$ doesn`t bundle IE with their OS, then how the fuck are you supposed to download Firefox on your computer to install that? You need a pre-installed browser with your OS in order to download stuff from the web! You`d have to download Firefox from another computer, put it on a usb stick, copy it over and then install. What a pain that would be, especially for someone that doesn`t have ready access to two computers (I do but not everyone does). Even though I had Firefox installed on my old desktop, I was too lazy to boot it up and copy it over to a usb stick so I re-downloaded it from my new laptop (using IE. I barely touched IE after that) to get Firefox on my laptop.

This really is nanny state bs. The consumer can very well download Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Netscape or whatever they feel like, install that and just use that. That`s what I do. I use Firefox and VLC instead of IE and Windows Media Player.

It`s no wonder the Xbox is losing in Europe no matter what M$ does. Europeans are heavily biased against Microsoft to the point of unfairness (fining them $2.4b US? What`s wrong with this government?) I PREFER using Firefox to IE and I PREFER using VLC to Windows Media Player and you don`t see me whining about this software being bundled with my Windows Vista and 7. In fact I think it`s convenient that IE was pre-installed. Made getting Firefox on each of my computers when I bought them very convenient.

Considering the ever increasing marketshare that Firefox commands I think its pretty offensive that any government would consider its citizens too stupid to look for alternatives.

2.4 Billion?

They should have stopped all Windows updates to Europe and said sorry your government is making us.

Ugh EU ....

a disgrace ..