I love using Google Earth on one of the windows workstations at the office. But, until tonight, I did not use it very much in Linux.

I use Slackware on my desktop workstation and home and Fedora 9 on my laptop. With both distributions of Linux, Google Earth ran at a glacial pace. The maps rendered partially at times, others they would tile incorrectly showing the same map tile over and over. Always it took several long moments for the map to refresh with any input.

It was frustrating as hell! So, I abandoned the idea of using Google Earth on linux and contented myself to using it only on Windows.

All this while I was making the classic 'newbie' mistake. Back in the mid '90s when I was fist learning Linux, many of the gurus in the #linux channels of the IRC networks never failed to tell me RTFM when I would ask the simplest questions. At first I thought they were being elitist and mean.

Those who know me, know that I have never been a fan of Microsoft or any of its products.

Back in Sept '95, when MS was busy trying to convince the world that Windows 95 was the OS for everybody - I was proving I was not just everybody and was busy installing Slackware Linux on a second computer that I had.

From then on, I used windows just for playing games. As a neophyte developer and geek - I found that windows did not give me the option to look under the hood, fix the things I did not like, or improve on its glaring shortcomings.

Netscape was my browser of choice. It ran on linux and windows, it was stable and their was no real alternative.

No alternative until MS released its first version Internet Explorer. Like many other geeks I downloaded a copy of it onto my windows box to play around with it. Not surprised to see that it ran like shit and crashed a lot. Back to Netscape.

When IE 4.0 was released, the choice of which browser to use was basically circumvented by Microsoft. When IE 4.0 installed, it wrote itself into the guts of windows. The default file manager of windows became IE. All default file associations having anything to do with web documents were now opened in IE regardless of what your previous browser preferences were. The windows end users were jammed into a corral of a buggy browser - OS with security holes big enough to drive a mac truck through.

The progression of removing browser choice from all but the most acute and savvy windows users continued through subsequent releases of IE versions 5 and 6. Netscape did not help the cause any by releasing it's monolithic buggy and non standards compliant flop, Netscape Communicator 4.0. 

For a couple years afterward, windows users were pretty much sentenced to an IE dominated wasteland - with a software provider (Microsoft) refusing to improve their browser or fix the well documented flaws.

At least until stable and fast alternatives like Firefox and Opera showed up on the market.

Maybe Microsoft has finally got the hint that many users hate their browser and have switched over to the current alternatives? That's not really important to the end user. What is important here is that that computer users who upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released will find that they will be able to disable Internet Explorer 8. Keep in mind, this will not removed the application and associated libraries from the operating system - but they won't have to deal with IE always getting in their face and hijack their box when they want to surf the web. IE 8 will basically because the retarded child application that gets locked up in the basement and out of site.

What is the reason for this decision by the worlds largest software manufacturer?

I can only postulate. I do know that the EU has given MS a huge ration of heat for bundling its browser so closely with the OS. The EU is one place MS is dying to get better market penetration and they are probably hoping this move on their part will smooth out the road a little bit for them.