According to ZDNet News, M$’s attempt last week to block MSN from rival browsers not only backfired to the extent of forcing them to back down, but it’s boosted downloads of rival browsers, and drawn the wrath of some fairly influential critics.
The squabble also prompted an outcry from [Tim] Berners-Lee, who holds the 3Com Founders Chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT. His response was surprising, given that Microsoft is a member of the W3C and the consortium has an unofficial policy of refraining from singling out individual members. Berners-Lee wrote the first Web client and server in 1990 and is credited with creating the World Wide Web.
“I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware,” he wrote in response to written questions. “This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe–they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information needed a different program to access it.”
[…] “Control over a person’s desktop and their browser is control over their whole Net-mediated perception of the world out there,” he wrote. “It is very powerful.”
Evidently, by the way, MSN is still not displaying properly on some browsers, though access is not being blocked.