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After many, many years at the top, the company's Internet Explorer browser is now coming under very real assault from superior products such as Mozilla Firebird, Opera and others.

The real achilles heel of IE is the seemingly endless list of critical vulnerabilities that have appeared and are quickly exploited by evil little sods keen on grabbing your all-important login details for services such as online banking.

Of course Microsoft is not a company to just sit back and say "oh well, fair enough, our browser sucks anyway so these guys deserve to be grabbing our marketshare".

But exactly how Microsoft responds to this threat will be very interesting to watch.

One would assume that they'd simply come out with a faster, smaller, more secure and all-round better browser so as to win back the hearts and minds of web-surfers -- but I'm not so sure that's all they'll do.

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It's worth noting that Bill has just been awarded a patent for the basic functionality of being able to tab between hypertext links on a webpage and that might perhaps indicate that Redmond may be prepared to mount a dual-pronged attack on its competition.

If Microsoft can lay claim (fairly or otherwise) to a raft of patents covering many of the basic mechanisms by which browsers are operated then they could simply spew out yet another lacklustre version of IE and rely on their sharks to keep the competitors at bay.

I kind of doubt that they'll do this any time soon, but if push comes to shove I wouldn't be betting against it.

If you look carefully, Microsoft has been building up a healthy portfolio of browser-related patents and if it chose to enforce those patents while simultaneously pushing its own products that use them, this could make life very difficult for its competitors.

This patent is a perfect example of what I mean.

Imagine if Microsoft decided to make this a major push in its online platforms from this point forwards...

No doubt many of the more feeble-brained web-designers (and there are plenty of them out there -- just look at how many websites only work with IE) would jump on the bandwagon and produce these MS-specific sites.

Mozilla, Opera and all the other browser developers would be left out in the cold unless Microsoft chose to sell them a license to use the relevant patent.

Now, based on Microsoft's track record, which path do you think Microsoft will chose to follow?

Will they pull out all the stops and produce a killer browser that blows all the others out of the water while offering bullet-proof security and robustness?

Or will they produce a so-so browser with lots of useless MS-specific features (protected by patents) and then spend a small fortune encouraging lame-brained web designers to rely heavily on these features when building sites?

What ever happened to the good old days when we all just got along and played nicely?

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