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Recently Microsoft has been accused by Mozilla and Opera stating the Antitrust policy of Microsoft for installing the Internet Explorer as the default internet browser. The matter was discussed legally and it concluded with Microsoft’s promise to the federal judge to stop setting Internet Explorer as the default browser upon installation.

An antitrust compliance report was issued as a result of accusations laid by Mozilla and Opera in May which stated, among other things, that Microsoft is changing the user preferences about their browsers and upon using the Windows Update Service, it sets IE8 as the default browser. Microsoft seemed to take advantage of the two options that are presented prior to IE8 installation - ‘Express’ and ‘Custom’. An average user would go for the ‘Express’ option (as it requires least user intervention) instead of ‘Custom’ and this did Microsoft a favor. The ‘Express’ install reportedly sets IE8 as the default browser which is a direct loss to other browsers.

Agreeing to the orders of the federal judge, Microsoft accepted its fault and released an update to fix this. Now users will see a pop-up prior to IE8 installations asking them whether or not IE8 be the default browser. The lawyers stated that Microsoft is keen on resolving other antitrust lawsuits including this one.

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