Yesterday Microsoft came out with a patch to satisfy US antitrust authorities. It’s all about the automatic installation of Internet Explorer 8 – or rather, it used to be.
Previously, when a user installed IE in Express mode, it automatically selected the browser as the default, even if the user had another browser selected as the default, and in a report, authorities weren’t too pleased:
"The Express option is most often selected by unsophisticated users who would then lose their prior default selection of a non-Microsoft browser."
The report is one the U.S. Department of Justice issues periodically to assess the way Microsoft has complied with a 2002 antitrust settlement. Under that, Microsoft agreed to make its products more interoperable with those of others.
The new patch does that, asking users if they want IE8 as their default browser or whether they’d prefer a different browser instead.
Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser, but its grip is slipping, from 74.18% last September to 67.68% last month, according to Net Applications.
