The European Commission has received backing from Google as to whether they should investigate the dominance of Microsoft in the browser market. Currently Microsoft has a majority (over 85%) market share of the browser market. Google has its own web browser named chrome, which is only 6 months old.

After receiving a complaint from another rival Opera, the European Commission has decided that it will investigate whether Microsoft has gained a competitive advantage unfairly by using its operating system to ship out its browser, which is Internet Explorer.

After their initial findings, the European Commission arrived at a conclusion that Microsoft had gained an unfair competitive advantage in the web browser market, which means that Microsoft has been in violation of the European law since 1996.

Microsoft has been given notice that it has to respond to the European Commission by late March. This could mean that Microsoft starts unbundling its web browser from their operating system in hope of escaping any punishment. 

By backing the case against Microsoft Google hopes to build a strong case against Microsoft and its abuse of power in the web browser market and thus stop Microsoft continue abusing its power in the browser market.

Microsoft has been trying to prevent Google’s growth by increasing their spending on their own search engine so that it could become more popular thus leaving Google behind. However this has not turned out well because Google is still miles ahead of any of the search engines.

The battle between Microsoft and Google has occasionally been fought in the courtrooms. Last year (2008) Microsoft raised serious anti-trust issues against Google’s plans to combine its adverts with Yahoo. The battle between these two business giants has continuously become more intense with each passing year and there is no slow down in sight.

Another rival of Microsoft, Mozilla has offered to help the European Commission with its current Investigation into Microsoft’s unfair dominance in the web browser market. Mozilla are the makers of Firefox, which is the second most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer (which belongs to Microsoft).

So the question is will the European Commission actually be able to stop Microsoft from being able to bundle its popular web browser with its operating system Windows or not?  The impending decision is going to have a very large effect on the subsequent success of Microsoft and its Windows product on the whole.

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3. Clearing your browser cache in Internet Explorer

This tutorial shows you how to clear your browser cache in Internet Explorer. This is particularly useful if you have noticed your PC become ‘sluggish’ when browsing the internet – a clear indication that your PC is storing too many files.

This is because the browser cache serves to store a copy of each web page you visit on your PC’s hard drive, it does this to speed up page loading times by not having to download each element every time you visit the page. This feature is very useful, but over time can cause your computer to slow down.

Open Microsoft Internet Explorer, click ‘Tools‘ in the top left corner, then click ‘Internet Options‘.

A window will pop open. First select the ‘Delete Cookies‘ button.

Another little window will pop up. Select ‘OK‘.

Then select ‘Delete Files’.

Another window will pop up, make sure you have ‘Delete all offline content‘ ticked.
Select ‘OK‘.

Then click the ‘OK‘ button near the bottom. This may take a few minutes to complete, so be patient.

Your browser cache has now been cleared. It is good practice at this point to reboot your computer.

If you use a different method or you’re having difficulties following this tutorial, please feel free to add your comments.

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