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It's a pretty silly argument to say that Google have been unfairly singled out, and quite wrong too. The companies that you mention have all had their share of regulatory intervention, especially in the EU. Your first example, Microsoft (exactly who was inconvenienced by their OOXML standard?) is the first company that springs to mind when thinking of EU intervention. Remember the browser choice screen or the two billion dollars in fines?

They are also keeping their eye on Apple in the eBook market, although I maintain that the consumer has benefited from Apple being able to strong-arm the record industry on removing their DRM. Facebook's privacy problems have also been the subject of scrutiny in the EU. And for Oracle...

No, I can't bring myself to even appear to defend Oracle!

So the idea that Google should be given a free pass because they are being unfairly picked on is just rubbish. That doesn't mean to say that the EU's complaint isn't without issue. The fact that Google displays links to its own vertical search services doesn't seem too unreasonable, and it is a practice that has gone on in the industry for years. I first saw this used by Yahoo when they linked to their own services in their results (eg. Yahoo Finance). And when I search for "microsoft stock price" on Google, I got links to an assortment of financial sites at the top of the results (eg. Yahoo Finance).

Similarly, when they include reviews or news from other sites, they always link to the source. That said I can see that there would be a concern if they show the entire news story or review which means that you never have to follow the link. I guess there is a legitimate concern about some of Google's practices, but I am wary of the heavy handed, simplistic approach that the EU regulators sometimes utilise.

Microsoft was actually repeatedly fined by EU for non-compliance with the ruling on the whole browser affair, for a total of something around 2 billion euro. The end result of this case is the browser selection screen that every user sees when they log in for the first time (provided that they are in EU).

why even bother with those... just point people to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ (and tell them to ignore the IE one, I suppose)

1. This update gets installed if you are in the EU and use XP or later.
2. If you have IE as default browser, this site opens at the next login, or when you click on the icon the update puts on your desktop (like this).

Hopefully this will help standards compliant browsers gain some marketshare. (Not that my country needs much help. :P)

Gosh, don't get all offended now ;)

It's simply the only distinguishing part -in- the description for Opera..
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

The powerful and easy-to-use Web browser. Try the only browser with Opera Turbo technology, and speed up your Internet connection.

Poland does have lovely broadband.. now all it needs is static IPs so I don't have to ban half the country (83.3.*.*-83.5.*.* and others) from my game server every time a handful of players decide to cheat and hit up the DHCP to get a new IP every time ;)

link to http://www.browserchoice.eu/

So how do I get it to display the other browsers that this article talks about? There's no scrollbar in my FF window that's showing that page. I tried a mouseover, and nothing happened. I told NoScript to allow scripts from the site, and that also produced no changes.

(Maybe it's because I looked at it from my Macbook Pro and my Ubuntu machine. Perhaps I should try it on my wife's Macbook, where she has a virtual Windows XP installed, and even has IE6 on it. This is for work reasons of course; she hates Windows. ;-)

a desktop link to http://www.browserchoice.eu/

Not being from Europe, and also having no intention to use Windows 7 any time in the near future, I haven't seen this "choice screen" until I just searched for a screen shot of it

This appears to be it (or a facsimile). My question is, if it's just a remote webpage, why on earth aren't they doing the shuffling server-side? It's a very cheap operation and they're relying on client script to do it?

it actually explains what a browser is and does...

It does? I'm looking at the page right now and all I can see is 7 variations of "This browser is fast and pretty" and Apple claiming Safari is the most innovative (it's not), Opera claiming that Opera Turbo "speeds up your internet connection" (it doesn't), and GreenBrowser saying it's f*cking green!

What use is that?!

This leads me to ask who wrote the descriptions of the various browsers.

It's something that is trivial to find out on your own. Here is the ballot page. If you click on "Tell me more" buttons, you'll see that all links lead to web pages hosted on a domain owned the company behind the browser (mozilla.com, apple.com, opera.com, google.com etc).

Sorry if that didn't provide any substance to yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory...

I read it not as "yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory", but as "yet another bashing on poor marketing from other companies than microsoft. (Granted apple has superb marketing as well, but that's not a target market).

This leads me to ask who wrote the descriptions of the various browsers.

It's something that is trivial to find out on your own. Here is the ballot page. If you click on "Tell me more" buttons, you'll see that all links lead to web pages hosted on a domain owned the company behind the browser (mozilla.com, apple.com, opera.com, google.com etc).

Sorry if that didn't provide any substance to yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory...

Opera also released its version 10.5. Their increase in downloads might not be only the result off being linked by the Broswerchoice Site, but people upgrading their browsers.

One thing I couldn't help but notice though, is that Microsoft always pops IE in the number one spot for a moment *before* shuffling the browsers and showing them in randomized order... Very visible if you visit the ballot manually in IE and hit F5 a few times: http://www.browserchoice.eu/

Yes, that's the initial ordering and very visible if one turns off Javascript (NoScript).

Internet Explorer 8
Mozilla Firefox
Opera Browser
Google Chrome
Safari
Maxthon
K-Meleon
Flock
Avant Browser
Sleipnir
FlashPeak SlimBrowser
GreenBrowser

What happens to the distribution when you run results through the function again?

I ask because I just went to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ and tried it about 40 times and IE only came up in the last spot all of three times (I was watching it specifically because of your post). While it's certainly possible I flipped heads 37 times out of 40, it seems extremely unlikely. In fact, I got twice as many hits on the first position for IE than the last, and more often than not it was in one of the middle three positions.

They start with the base list each time (you can see it briefly on the refresh), so in my opinion you haven't shown that running the flawed function a second time doesn't normalize the distribution adequately.

The function they used seems perfectly acceptable for a random list of browsers.

What I find even worse than the 'non-randomness' of the choice screen, is that the choices are shown in a fixed order as the page is downloaded and prior to the script being run. This can take several seconds, depending on your connection speed etc. This is more than enough to read the first couple of entries and make your choice.

Internet explorer 8 is the first choice in the fixed order that you see while the page is downloading.

http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

They should have the options as 'visible=false' until they are randomly sorted, then make them visible.

The relevant code is in their Javascript:

aBrowserOrderTop5.sort(RandomSort); (they repeat this twice for some reason) ...
function RandomSort (a,b)
{
        return (0.5 - Math.random());
}

This takes the browser's built-in sorting function, tells it to sort by an essentially random criteria, and hopes that it all works out. Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on the implementation of the built-in sort function, and that's up to the browser designer to create. The only constraint on the structure of sort is that it must successfully order comprehensible data, which does not mean that it will properly randomize data when provided. Essentially, they overloaded a black-box function that wasn't designed for randomization in the hopes that it would work.

For an instance of why this wouldn't work, consider the case of the last item. Say that you're sorting a list of 5 letters. Now say that you're most of the way through the list, having properly sorted the first 4 letters into "A, B, D, E", with just the 5th letter C left. So you step through.
Does C come before E? Yes.
Does C come before D? Yes.
Does C come before B? No.
C must go between B and D, and the list will look like "A , B , C , D , E." It will be sorted correctly every time.

Now let's throw that randomization into the middle there. Let's start again with the list, though since we're randomizing let's call them item 1, 2, 3, and 4. If we're properly randomly sorting the last item 5 into the list, it should have equal chances of showing up everywhere. But remember, we're still using the sorting algorithm from above, we're just flipping a coin at each question instead of actually comparing. So what we get is:

Does 5 come before 4? 50% yes, or stop
Does 5 come before 3? 50% yes, or stop
Does 5 come before 2? 50% yes, or stop

etc. But because it's iterative, those 50% chances stack. You only get to the second question half of the time, so you only get to the third question half of that half of the time. And essentially what you wind up with is a % chance of the last number being sorted into each of the slots as: 3%, 6%, 12%, 25%, 50%. This is obviously not a random distribution curve.

This is not necessarily the sort algorithm that Microsoft uses in I.E. (The 50% chance of staying as the last element is a bit suspicious, though, as is running their code twice). But it does point out unequivocably that you can't overload an off-the-shelf sort algorithm with a randomizing comparator and expect the outcome to follow a genuinely random distribution curve. They really ought to have an in-house random sort algorithm that their developers can pull from.

(Thanks to another poster for finding the first google hit that describes this method.).

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" One thing I couldn't help but notice though, is that Microsoft always pops IE in the number one spot for a moment *before* shuffling the browsers and showing them in randomized order... Very visible if you visit the ballot manually in IE and hit F5 a few times: http://www.browserchoice.eu/

I just noticed the URL in the screenshot: www.browserchoice.eu, and the site is already online!

On the first load, it gave me the choices in the order similar to the screenshot, interestingly enough.

Here it is if you want to view the real thing:

http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

You could just visit the browser ballot page directly.

I was surprised none of the articles I've seen have provided a direct link... I saw the screenshot from the Microsoft blog, and figured the site was already live.

+1 Informative

You could just visit the browser ballot page directly.

For reference, the browsers listed are IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Flock, FlashPeak, K-Meleon, Avant, Maxthon, Sleipnir & GreenBrowser