Stripping out IE from Windows 7 is an attempt to duplicate a failed remedy from an earlier antitrust ruling, Opera says

Microsoft’s plan to strip out its Internet Explorer (IE) browser from Windows 7, due for sale in the fall, in Europe is designed to force the European Commission’s hand as it devises an antitrust remedy to restore fair competition in the browser market, said Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Norwegian browser maker Opera.

“Microsoft is trying to set the remedy itself by stripping out IE,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

Opera complained to the Commission about the bundling of IE in Windows in 2007. The complaint sparked an antitrust probe that resulted in formal charges of monopoly abuse in January this year.

The Commission is now formulating a remedy that would include the creation of a ballot screen containing a selection of browsers for users to choose from when they install Windows on their new computers.

Von Tetzchner said such a remedy is just as important now as it was before Microsoft announced the plan to unbundle IE from the new version of the OS.

Microsoft, however, is trying to derail the process by offering a version of Windows without a browser, said Von Tetzchner. “They are trying to replicate the remedy in the media player case, which we all know didn’t work.”

“If Microsoft got its way there would be no ballot screen, just a version of Windows that has no browser at all — just like the edition ‘n’ of Windows that resulted from the earlier European antitrust case,” he said.

In that case in 2004, the Commission ruled that Microsoft had distorted competition in the market for media players by bundling its Windows Media Player into Windows. It ordered the software giant to sell a version of Windows that had the media player stripped out, as well as selling the fully bundled version of Windows.

The ruling didn’t insist on a price differential between the two versions. Microsoft complied, launching Windows edition ‘n’ which, not surprisingly, bombed in the market.

The Commission doesn’t want to make the same mistake this time, in its remedy for restoring competition in the browser market, and rival browser makers are insistent that there must be no repeat of the edition ‘n’ debacle.

“It’s very important that there is an effective remedy for the browser market,” Von Tetzchner said.

“Now that Microsoft has acknowledged it has been breaking the law by bundling IE into Windows, the Commission must push ahead with an effective remedy,” he added.

A ruling by the Commission was expected late this year. Von Tetzchner said it may come sooner, following Microsoft’s decision to strip out IE from Windows 7. “Their decision should make room for a faster conclusion,” he said.

Morro is expected to run Windows OneCare’s antimalware engine but will use fewer system resources and won’t be bundled into the OS

A beta version of Microsoft’s free anti-virus software — code-named Morro — will soon be available from the company’s Web site, according to a report.

Reuters says Microsoft employees are already testing the software ahead of a broader rollout in the near future. The company declined to provide a specific date for Morro’s release, but said the trial version would be available “soon.”

Microsoft announced its plan to replace its Windows Live OneCare security software with a free anti-virus product last November.

The company said at the time that Morro would help encourage more people to take anti-virus seriously, claiming nearly 50 percent of Windows users don’t have an anti-virus tool installed on their PC.

“Our goal with OneCare was to get more customers more protected, and I don’t think we were able to do that to the extent that we would have liked,” said Amy Barzdukas, a senior director of product management with Microsoft. “As we look around the world now, the countries where PC growth is most rapid, in emerging markets such as Brazil and India and China, the malware threat is even greater.”

However, Morro, which is expected to run Windows OneCare’s antimalware engine but will use fewer system resources, won’t be bundled into the operating system, Barzdukas said at the time. That decision could help placate concerns from security software vendors, whose ability to sell anti-virus products to consumers would be hampered if Microsoft bundled a free tool with its operating systems.

Release Date

Microsoft Confirmed that they are ready to put Windows 7 on store shelves and computer makers will have systems ready to sell with Vista’s successor on Oct. 22.

Microsoft will also offer discounted or free upgrades to Windows 7 to users who buy PCs in the months leading up to the operating system’s launch in a program dubbed “Windows Upgrade Option,” said a company spokeswoman.

Till the confirmation of the released date, Microsoft had been coy about naming a release date for Windows 7, although it edged toward a timetable last month. Both Bill Veghte, the senior vice president who runs the Windows Business unit, and Steven Sinofsky, the senior vice president of the Windows engineering group, said then that Windows 7 was on track for the holiday selling season, and would make the final milestone — called “release to manufacturing,” or RTM — in mid-August.

Speed Test

A post directed from PC world,

“Improving performance is one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving 10 common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12% speed-up to a 26% speed-up, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7’s disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.

Windows 7 won’t expand the narrow market

Post directed from www.sci-technews.com

Ben Reitzser (from one of U.S.A’s respectable companies Barclays Capital ) expert of analysis, he said “Microsoft’s new OS Windows 7 won’t be enough for save the market. Market won’t be better than now”. He claimed, Windows 7 won’t expand the narrow market .

And expectations, notebook sales will increase and on 2009 sales will be 40 million.

Windows 7’s User Interface

On October 28, 2008, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until then, the company had been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers were finally off, the scale of the new OS became clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

While windows 7 doesn’t undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn’t made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won’t show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

So, rather than low-level, largely invisible system changes, the work on Windows 7 has focused much more on the user experience. The way people use computers is changing; for example, it’s increasingly the case that new PCs are bought to augment existing home machines rather than replacement, so there are more home networks and shared devices. Business users are switching to laptops, with the result that people expect to seamlessly use their (Domain-joined) office PC on their home network.

As well as these broader industry trends, Microsoft also has extensive data on how people use its software. Through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), an optional, off-by-default feature of many Microsoft programs, the company has learned a great deal about the things that users do. For example, from CEIP data Microsoft knows that 70% of users have between 5 and 15 windows open at any one time, and that most of the time they only actively use one or two of those windows. With this kind of data, Microsoft has streamlined and refined the user experience.

The biggest visible result of all this is the taskbar. The taskbar in Windows 7 is worlds apart from the taskbar we’ve known and loved ever since the days of Chicago.

Text descriptions on the buttons are gone, in favor of big icons. The icons can—finally—be rearranged; no longer will restarting an application put all your taskbar icons in the wrong order. The navigation between windows is now two-level; mousing over an icon shows a set of window thumbnails, and clicking the thumbnail switches windows.

Right clicking the icons shows a new UI device that Microsoft calls “Jump Lists.”

They’re also found on the Start Menu:

Jump lists provide quick access to application features. Applications that use the system API for their Most Recently Used list (the list of recently-used filenames that many apps have in their File menus) will automatically acquire a Jump List containing their most recently used files. There’s also an API to allow applications to add custom entries; Media Player, for example, includes special options to control playback.

This automatic support for new features is a result of deliberate effort on Microsoft’s part. The company wants existing applications to benefit from as many of the 7 features as they can without any developer effort. New applications can extend this automatic support through new APIs to further enrich the user experience. The taskbar thumbnails are another example of this approach. All applications get thumbnails, but applications with explicit support for 7 will be able to add thumbnails on a finer-grained basis. IE8, for instance, has a thumbnail per tab (rather than per window).

Window management has also undergone changes. In recognition of the fact that people tend only to use one or two windows concurrently, 7 makes organizing windows quicker and easier. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them.

Another common task that 7 improves is “peeking” at windows; switching to a window briefly just to read something within the window but not actually interact with the window. To make this easier, scrubbing the mouse over the taskbar thumbnails will turn every window except the one being pointed at into a glass outline; moving the mouse away will reinstate all the glass windows. As well as being used for peeking at windows, you can also peek at the desktop:

Peeking at the desktop is particularly significant, because the desktop is now where gadgets live. Because people are increasingly using laptops, taking up a big chunk of space for the sidebar isn’t really viable; Microsoft has responded by scrapping the sidebar and putting the gadgets onto the desktop itself. Gadgets are supposed to provide at-a-glance information; peeking at the desktop, therefore, becomes essential for using gadgets.

The taskbar’s system tray has also been improved. A common complaint about the tray is that it fills with useless icons and annoying notifications. With 7, the tray is now owned entirely by the user. By default, new tray icons are hidden and invisible; the icons are only displayed if explicitly enabled. The icons themselves have also been streamlined to make common tasks (such as switching wireless networks) easier and faster.

The other significant part of the Windows UI is Explorer. Windows 7 introduces a new concept named Libraries. Libraries provide a view onto arbitrary parts of the filesystem with organization optimized for different kinds of files. In use, Libraries feel like a kind of WinFS-lite; they don’t have the complex database system underneath, but they do retain the idea of a custom view of your files that’s independent of where the files are.

These UI changes represent a brave move by the company. The new UI takes the concepts that Windows users have been using for the last 13 years and extends them in new and exciting ways. Windows 7 may not change much under the hood, but the extent of these interface changes makes it clear that this is very much a major release.