Lately, a lot of talk has been coming out of Europe. The talk I am referring to concerns an anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling a web browser they make with an operating system they make. The claim is that Microsoft has made competition in the web browser market difficult because Internet Explorer is included with Microsoft's Windows (a computer operating system).

After Microsoft killed Netscape, there was no serious competitor to Internet Explorer in the browser wars. For years, Microsoft lorded its dominance of the web browser market. Then along came Firefox, the open source web browser that took the world by storm.

Firefox, the open-source web browser, is close to overtaking the rival Microsoft product, Internet Explorer, in Germany, but Firefox still lags well behind in the rest of the world, according to market data Monday.

Mozilla Firefox 3, the free and open source web browser, has finally overtaken Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and is getting closer and closer behind IE 7. According to data from StatCounter Global Stats, for the first time in February of this year, Firefox 3 with 24% market share overtook IE 6.

Firefox, the browser that dared to challenge the supremacy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has just reached 400m downloads - and deservedly so. It now claims a market share of nearly 20% in the UK and 30% in Germany. Firefox, part of the admirable Mozilla Foundation, is based on open source, created and improved on by volunteers all over the world.

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would like you to believe.

Firefox downloads boosted by new release and Internet Explorer security scare. Mozilla's open source browser experienced a healthy boost in popularity last week on the back of a new release and security concerns about Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

"...Microsoft's proposal is for web developers to opt-in to Internet Explorer 8's standards mode by adding in a new meta tag (or HTTP header) [...] Microsoft are demanding that we web standards developers favour them with time, cost and effort, while they continue to abrogate their responsibilities to their half a billion clients. [...] Microsoft on the other hand are now expecting us web developers to carry the burden of their responsibility. Instead of Microsoft abiding by the responsibility of rendering pages according to the open defined standards, Microsoft are intent on making standards-based pages second class citizens. [...] We web developers should not be paying for Microsoft's mistakes.

"...We're not here to solve Microsoft's problems. Microsoft's solution is for web standards developers to carry the burden of its browser failings. That is unacceptable for us, as web standards developers. Web standards development is browser agnostic. For open standard to flourish, we have to be independent of the browser vendors..."