This week, the European Commission announced its preliminary satisfaction with a settlement offer proposed by Microsoft that would end an antitrust battle that has been simmering for over 10 years. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith posted a response that said: "We welcome today’s announcement by the European Commission to move forward with formal market testing of Microsoft’s proposal relating to web browser choice in Europe. We also welcome the opportunity to take the next step in the process regarding our proposal to promote interoperability with a broad range of our products.”

As Smith alludes to, a big part of the proposed settlement has to do with Microsoft including a browser ballot window in Internet Explorer that lists a broad array of browsers and allows users to choose which one to use. Opponents of that proposal, including Mozilla and Opera, have criticized the fact that the ballot screen is found within Internet Explorer, which is still bundled with Windows, and the fact that any alternative browser must be downloaded, which many users will be too lazy to do. So why are Mozilla and Opera being so reticent in the wake of the European announcement?

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OStatic's Firefox Superguide

In a two-part series here on OStatic in March, Brian McConnell, who works with language translation sites Worldwide Lexicon and Der Mundo, did a post here, and one here on emerging tools for multilingual web sites and on-the-fly translation of web content from one language to another. As he wrote there: "For many publishers and web app developers, from independent bloggers to high volume sites, designing a site to be multilingual is an afterthought, often thought to be extremely difficult. That's unfortunate because the world is a big place, and there's a lot of interesting content out there waiting to be read, if people can find it and understand it."

Sure enough, tools for instant translation of web content from one language to another are works in progress, but they are getting better. Now, Brian has sent me over a quick-to-install Firefox extension that lets me jump to web pages in other languages, and, with a couple of clicks, get good translations of the entire pages. I have to say this is pretty slick. Here's how you can try it.