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?

Following TechCrunch's recent post showing alleged photos of Google's upcoming Chrome OS, which don't seem to show much beyond the fact that the operating system may have very large icons, there are some new clues emerging about it. As Download Squad cites, based on notes in a post detailing changes to the Chrome browser's Chromium core, Chrome OS sounds a lot like a bootable browser running on Linux. There are reasons to believe that as soon as you start the operating system, you'll be in the Chrome browser, and reasons to believe that you won't have the choice to use other browsers. That could potentially cause Google trouble.

In a move that could quickly be followed by similar deals, Google has reportedly inked a deal with Sony to pre-install the Chrome web browser on new Sony VAIO computers. As JKOnTheRun notes, "this marks the first deal that Google has signed with a hardware vendor to get Chrome involved in consumers’ OOBE (out of box experience)." The out of box experience with a browser is particularly important on consumer systems, where many users will simply use whichever browser is already installed, and similar bundling deals are what helped propel Microsoft's Internet Explorer to dominant market share. There isn't any word on what kind of money changed hands here, but I'm guessing it was a significant amount, and this deal is another sign of strong momentum for open source browsers. Check out more details here.