In a running saga which has lasted since before Windows XP’s release back in 2001, Microsoft have finally shipped an update for their Windows platform which will allow users to choose the web browser they want to run.

Windows 7 in Europe was due to have the update built in when it was released back in October 2009, but last-minute wranglings between the EU and Microsoft saw the deadline off for another short period. Now users will get the choice which was proposed then – a pop-up box asking whether the user wishes to keep on using Internet Explorer 8 or whether they want to switch to Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Apple Safari.

This is the end of part of Microsoft’s problems with antitrust and competition regulators who wanted to see MS’s practice of making Internet Explorer tightly entwined with their operating systems end. Microsoft’s Windows platform has enjoyed a very dominant market position over the last few years, meaning most web users didn’t even know there was a choice of web browser in the first place.

Whether this will help make the web a safer place is still unknown, however.

Microsoft, kings of buggy software, have just patched a bug in their Windows operating systems which was discovered by a Google techie – except this one was almost old enough to drink legally.

The 17 year old bug is in the NTVDM piece of software, responsible for allowing old MS-DOS based programs to function in the Windows NT, XP, Vista and 7 lines of OSes produced by Microsoft.

Why this bug has taken so long to locate, and whether it is a genuine security risk these days is a mystery, only that it has indeed existed since Windows NT 3.1 and is still present in the most modern versions of Windows.

Now I’m no Microsoft basher, but surely it should have been detected by someone inside their organisation long before now, not some Google security analyst in 2010?