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A-M$: Recent Microsoft Behavior
Found at:
www.macosrumors.com
however, it will be placed on:
www.macosrumors.com/archive107.shtml
on December 2 and the following days.
Evidence of anti-competitive efforts by Microsoft in Internet products....?
After sifting through over 1,200 messages sent in by readers
over the past several days since Rumors ran with an update
story on the topic of possible efforts by Microsoft to develop
ways to underhandedly build market share for its Internet
Explorer (MSIE) and Internet Information Server (IIS) Products,
the conclusions seem inescapable: Microsoft appears to
have indeed implemented at least two ways in which it can make
other companies' and organizations' web browsers and
servers seem slower and less compatible, when in fact it may be
Microsoft's own products causing the problems in a
fashion that is extremely suspicious.
Now, before Microsoft rains legal Death from Above upon
us, we must say that no hard evidence of these anti-competitive
functions in MSIE and the IIS server can be truly had
without reverse-engineering the products or obtaining the source code
to the products, neither of which have been done at
present. What information we do have is simply speculation on what
appear to be the facts based on a preponderance of reader
reaction and experience with the products in question. We're simply
relating the contents of a large volume of recent e-mail,
and making limited conclusions from the information contained in
them. We welcome reactions from our readers and from
Microsoft.
With that said.... The reaction from our readers was
overwhelming. One Thousand, Two Hundred and Twenty-Eight of
our readers wrote in about this topic in particular -- and, out
of that huge a pool, only about forty had something to say
other than that they had experienced the same problems we had
spoken of (Microsoft being the only browser which
consistently had problems downloading Netscape products from
the Web when cookies or specific Javascripts were
involved, yet not at any other site), or had evidence to relate
regarding previous rumors of Microsoft's IIS server giving
clear preference to its own MSIE browser over all others.
Out of the 1,228 readers who wrote in, approximately 850 had
had a similar experience with MSIE causing problems of
all descriptions when attempting to download Netscape Navigator
or Communicator, virtually any version, from the Web
(directly connecting to Netscape FTP servers appears to be
problem-free, although that means little). Here's an excellent
example:
After reading your article so much clicked into place. A
while back, I had DL'd a copy of IE3.01 to use when I preview my
HTML (I do a lot of web work). After a while, Netscape
went corrupt (my fault, shutting down manually and stuff), and I
had to try to download it using IE. After a few hours of
trying and failing, trying and failing (this over our T-1 connection)
for one of maybe ten totally different reasons, I gave up
and tried sifting through the Netscape FTP servers with Fetch,
which finally worked.
I have now trashed IE and hope that the DoJ nails MS to
the wall. This is just BS. What do you want to bet that Nav. went
corrupt in the first place from that bug that people keep
talking about where after installing MSIE, Netscape starts getting
messed up?
More insidious, however, were the stories of Microsoft's IIS
Web server handling incoming connections by responding
to queries from MSIE before any other browser:
A friend and I, both long-time Apple, Microsoft (yeah,
yeah) and Linux developers, read your article and decided to sit down
and try out MSIE, Navigator 4.03, Lynx (on Linux 2.x),
MacLynx, OmniWeb 3.0b3 (on Rhapsody Dev. Release), and a
copy of Mosaic, and connect to two servers set up on our
local network (and later, across the Internet, about four hops):
MS's IIS latest final release, and Apache 1.0.5, both
running on Pentium 200MMX's with 96mb of RAM and Fast/Wide
SCSI-3 drives.
What happened? Well, by using our router's monitoring
utilities and a little packet tracking hack we whipped up (definitely
not all our own work), we watched the browsers connecting
repeatedly (using scripts we wrote for all the apps on the Mac
OS, and manually with Lynx and OmniWeb). MSIE got packet
replys before all the others from the IIS server, every time
the server had requests from several browsers incoming at
virtually the exact same time. When we tried it with
Apache...results were pretty close for all the browsers,
although Lynx seemed to have a small advantage there (could have
been the speed of the machine it was on, a Quad Pentium
Pro <g>).
Something's rotten in Denmark.
All in all, the information received by Rumors does not suggest
that the claims of possible anti-competitive behavior on
Microsoft's part are groundless. In fact, when two Microsoft
employees who wish to remain anonymous read the original
article, they commented simply, "We've noticed the same things.
Around here, though, you learn to ignore that kind of
thing and keep your eyes on your own monitor. Sometimes it
feels more like we're working at the CIA, instead of a
software company."
Copies of the most poignant messages are being passed on to
legal authorities through a third party.