In any case Microsoft should be forced to separate IE from Windows. "I would like Microsoft to remove their browser from Windows," von Tetzchner said.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, didn't have a remedy in mind, but agreed with Opera's CEO that there's a problem. "In a functioning market, vendors producing superior products would take share from vendors producing inferior products," Dotzler said in a . "Today, that's simply not possible because the cost of the most effective channel for distribution, shipping as the default browser with new computers, for everyone except the OS vendor, is prohibitively high," he argued.

In its original complaint, Opera also accused Microsoft of stymieing the development of Web standards by forcing site designers to adhere to IE's own implementation of certain protocols. "Microsoft's unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain and technologically inferior, and that can even expose users to security risks," Opera charged in late 2007.

Without having had a chance to read the EU's new charges, von Tetzchner said he didn't know if the Commission had also integrated Opera's Web standards complaint in the accusations. The Commission, however, hinted that it had. "In addition, the Commission is concerned that the ubiquity of Internet Explorer creates artificial incentives for content providers and software developers to design websites or software primarily for Internet Explorer which ultimately risks undermining competition and innovation in the provision of services to consumers," the EU said.

Other antitrust regulars have cited IE's dominance as well. In October 2007, for instance, a group of U.S. state attorneys general urged a federal judge to hold Microsoft to a 2002 antitrust settlement , in part over concerns over IE. A year ago, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to November of this year.