Microsoft and EC settle their IE dispute

Good to see the European Union competition commissioner has finally come to its senses and settled its silly and costly business practices lawsuit against Microsoft over the bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows.

This seemed like pure harassment to me – browsers are free, users can easily download and install any browser they want, and service providers could have included or recommended browsers if their customers demanded help. In fact, you could even argue that ubiquitous feature-rich free browsers have worked to everyone’s benefit (though I do not believe Microsoft set the market price of free).

Anyway, Microsoft and the European Commission are now in agreement. Microsoft has agreed to give the user a choice of leading browsers in versions of Windows and presumably the EC can find better things to do.