Someone tipped me that there is some interesting posts about the private US Federal Reserve (which isn’t federal and has no reserve) central bank at Microsoft MSN’s Moneycentral forums. So I tried to go there using the link I got.

moneycentral.msn.com/community/message/board.asp?board=fedwatch&BoardID=494

No website for you!

I was amazed to find that the criminal Microsoft Corporation (yes, they really are convinced numerous times and there are ongoing cases) are still engaging in outrageous business behavior.

This was what showed up when I visited their website using a uncommon webbrowser based on the Gecko rendering engine:

MSN’s Moneycentral falsely claims that “This feature requires a more recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox” and goes on to say that I should “download the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer” by visiting that web browsers website.

Now I’m back and I’ve installed Internet Explorer. Honestly.

Gecko is a commonly used rendering engine which is the basis of numerous web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Seamonkey, Galeon, Epiphany and Kazehakase – to name a few. These browsers all use the same basic rendering engine and share a common set of basic features.

You can, for example, type in about:config in the address bar to get a simple list of all the browsers settings and change them. You can even add new and mostly undocumented configuration strings using this basic config “page”. You can Right-click and select New -> String, type in general.useragent.override and give this key any value you see fit.

A quick grep for MSIE in this blogging service’s logs came up with a bunch of different MSIE user-agent strings such as this one:

“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)”

Let’s refresh that web page and see what happens now that I’m “using” Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft’s Windows NT Operating system, shall we?

It is clear that their story about

“This feature requires a more recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox”

is clearly a big lie which is put there to sucker anyone not using Microsoft’s browser or one of the many free software browsers into switching to their product.

The truth is that their website doesn’t require a recent version of, or even any version of, IE or FF. No. It’s this simple:

Microsoft only requires you to say you are using their browser. You can use any Gecko-based webbrowser as long as you pretend you’re using Microsoft’s product.

Opera-user? Guess you’re just screwed, then.

But you can’t use Opera or Konqueror (which is based on the KHTML rendering engine, meaning that the site probably also don’t work with Mac’s Safari) . Perhaps these browser technologies actually lack the proper Javascript support, perhaps not. If true then we can only speculate why Microsoft designed their website they way they did, it strikes me as likely that they did it intentionally in order to keep these browsers out. They probably wanted to lock Firefox-users out too, I guess they decided to allow one variant of one competing rendering engine to view their website to avoid legal trouble..

The Real Solution: Don’t use Microsoft

That’s the only one good long-term solution to the problem of Microsoft abusing it’s dominant position in every way: don’t use them. Switch to a variant of the GNU operating system if you’re a Windows user. And don’t buy their hardware or use their web services if you’re already a GNU user. The world doesn’t need them and would surely be a better place without Microsoft. And their power is, regardless of their size and position, limited to the amount we, the people, give them by supporting them.