Same logic presumably applies to any kind of non-system application, then. Your OS shouldn't come with any particular choice of network client tool - wget (hey! Some of us prefer curl!), ssh, dig. Microsoft's inclusion of notepad.exe in windows is obviously unfair to open source and commercial competitors in the text editing space - and the fact that basically any windows standard text editor control is an instance of the notepad editing UI below the surface is precisely the kind of cross-layer mixing you object to.

I think the line starts to blur as soon as your software uses API calls that are only known to you, the OS vendor, when you use your market muscle in the OS field to attempt to dominate or crowd out competitors in established fields and so on. I don't think anybody would read what I wrote as an objection to the presence of notepad.exe with the windows distribution and I note that that presence never stopped anybody from releasing more capable text editors, in fact I believe microsoft ships such a product themselves at a premium.

> Does it?

Yes.

You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser?

Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc).

Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.

FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required.

> Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.

You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free.

People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.

I think the world is probably a worse place if every computer user was given a command prompt and asked to use wget over FTP to get themselves a web browser. Or worse, if they had to go to Best Buy to buy one on DVD. Like, I can and will make a joke about having to try and put the DVD into the smartphone, but seriously, that sounds worse for pretty much everybody.

Ok. So let's standardize on Firefox (or Opera), get rid of all the others by default and let users enable IE/Firefox/Safari and so on if and when they desire to do so.

And all three heavyweight gorilla IT companies could support FF/Opera with a clean conscience by donating (just like google does already, points for them).

Personally I feel this is not worth the effort. Though this reminds me of Apple's attempt to push users to use Safari, which I agree is a bad idea.

And googles attempts to get people to switch to chrome. That button really got on my nerves. As if it should matter to google what browser I use to view a website. Oh, wait, it does.

I think most of that targeted IE users.

Could be. I never used IE during that period though and I saw that button more than any other content on google properties.

I know people who are pissed because Microsoft bundled in their own TCP/IP stack, which killed the companies that were selling TCP/IP stacks for Windows.

When I ask them "can you imagine any OS delivered today without that bundled in?" they change the subject.

Network support has been an OS feature since before Microsoft even existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

Yes, there are people that probably would have preferred Peter Tattam's company to be bought by MS. (It was shareware, see thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875). But it definitely wasn't an obligation.

Very few would argue that an OS has to have a browser to be functional. Just like very few would argue that all networking should be done in a user space process not part of the operating system.

An OS doesn't have to have a file browser either, yet no one cried antitrust when Windows 95 bundled Windows Explorer instead of forcing people to buy Norton Commander.

This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's leaving out intent, which is a very important contextual part of evaluating the action of a person or entity. Seeing emails showing MS trying to deliberately get web developers hooked on a "more standards-compliant" IE and then locking those same devs in is a much different thing than MS honestly wanting people to have a decent default software base to go with Windows, even if both strategies end up in practice with "IE 4 preinstalled".

Wrong. Every Window manager has been shipping with a browser, that includes Windows and Apple but also Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, anything with Gnome/KDE/XFCE.

But there (still!) are plenty of people who start with an empty distro and gradually build up, and installing a browser happens just like any other package installation: through the package manager.