By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
The consent decree that settled the US government's antitrust suit against Microsoft is back in the news with a complaint from Google that Vista limits consumer choice of desktop search software.
It's not that tools like Google Search don't work with Vista, rather that the search giant claims there is no practical way to run off Vista's own indexing function. Having two lots of indexing running in parallel has an adverse impact on overall performance. 4sysops notes that Vista's indexing service can be disabled completely.
The problem is that the search functions of various parts of Vista rely on those indexes. That's not really surprising, and parallels can be found elsewhere. For instance, Apple's Mac OS X and some of its accompanying applications do much the same with the Spotlight search feature. What Google seems to be complaining about is that there's no provision for a user to swap out Vista's search and indexing in favour of one provided by a third party.
The original case centred on browsers, and Microsoft eventually implemented a system that allows the user to set a default browser other than Internet Explorer. But it is not feasible to remove Internet Explorer from a system, because various functions and applications bypass this setting and open Internet Explorer when a browser is needed.
Read full article on itwire
Last update : 14-06-2007 06:38
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