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Microsoft Tweaks Browser Ballot As EU Deal Nears
CWmike writes "Microsoft has revamped the browser ballot screen demanded by European Union antitrust regulators and may get final approval as early as Dec. 15, a source familiar with the case has told Computerworld. As first reported by Bloomberg, Microsoft modified the ballot screen after rivals, including Opera Software and Mozilla, demanded changes. Last month, Opera, Mozilla and Google submitted change requests to the European Commission, asking that the order of the browsers be randomized and that the ballot be displayed in its own application, not in Internet Explorer. According to the source, who asked not to be identified because the terms of the settlement have not been officially approved, the top five browsers — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari — will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed."
The top five browsers — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari — will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed
If you have any idea what a "browser" is, and which browser you need, which most people simply don't, then you wouldn't need random order to "help you" in your choice. We know what this is really about: the other 4 browser makers hoping to gain some market share by confusing the Windows users. I'll call it the casino browser installer. Make your lucky pick!
I wonder how long it would be before a bunch of lawyers make a company with a quick Firefox clone and sue EU/Microsoft for not being included in that ballot deal.
...the top five browsers -- IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari -- will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed.
Guess what! Next, the complainants will not be happy with the way the randomization code is implemented. I guess they will propose an Open Source one.
Frankly, I cannot wait to get finished with this bickering, and besides, Firefox is not doing badly in Germany at all!
will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed
The implications of this are very saddening. That's beyond promoting competition, and just dividing up the booty.
Why stop at browsers then? We could breath new life into the text editor market, casual picture editing market, file compression market, file browser market, music player market, etc. These ALL existed! Where are their randomized ballot windows? Hell, that's free advertising! Where do I sign up to have the VB 3 based browser I wrote in 8th grade added? We could all be using HyperMonkeyMarkup right now!
If this is what the web browser market needs to be competitive, imagine what it could do for open source. There is redundancy up the wazoo, we could have random ballots for EVERY category. Then people will have the ultimate freedom, and those who merely pick the top of the list will randomly populate lopsided projects like Gnome/KDE, Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris/Hurd, GIMP/MyFirstPictureEditor, MySQL/Postgres, vi/emacs. It makes PERFECT sense, Hurd+KDE+mono port of emacs has been in the shadows too long, time to send the clueless masses that way and even things out.
On a serious note, when has choice in Linux ever been randomized? What message would that send?
As a long time Opera user, all this nonsense makes me want to just install Internet Explorer to spite the lot of them. (OK, as a web developer I know I will be installing all of them on my test computer)
The reason I have always prefered Opera is that I get all the functionality without having to install other plug-ins and programs. I'm getting too old to just keep tinkering with my setup. In my youth I probably spent 90% of my time installing new stuff & writing programs to streamline my system and only 10% actually being productive. These days I want it to be 10% tinkering and 90% productivity.
So it annoys me that when I install Windows I now have to install mail and web programs because Microsoft were forced to separate them all.
People keep saying that people use Internet Explorer because they don't know any better (and don't know the opposition products), but I don't think that those people outside the geek community WANT to have to know about them. They just want to use a computer to do stuff. It is only as I have got older that I have really appreciated this.
Unfairly? The company should have been busted up for the shit they pulled. They're getting off easy. I hope the EU perpetually causes them grief, they have earned it in spades.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How do you know that no part of the windows selling price is for development of IE? Do you think all the apps in Windows is made by programmers in their free time and the OS itself is made when they are at work? Notepad, freecell, IE. Non of them are free.
The randomization is bad for one big reason. Since they will never be in the same order, when family calls for help I can't just tell them to click on the middle one
Oh come on now. I'm sure your family may not be tech wizards, but it's taking it a bit too far to say they can not discern distinct objects based on a simple description. How did they learn to read? I'm pretty sure that "click the blue E, red O, planet with fox, compass icon, four-color beach ball" would be enough of a guide for any person who have enough intelligence for basic daily tasks to select the right one.
The question is, would everyone have someone on the phone giving advice during setup? Not always.
The only possible reason that you would care about your position on a serial list of choices is if you knew that the majority of people making said choice really don't care about what they're choosing, and their choice would end up being random (i.e., primacy effect, serial position effect, google it).
But the premise of this whole debacle is that people are not given a choice of browser when they install an OS, and that is the reason that IE has such a large market share (since it's installed by default).
So basically, these other browser makers are fighting over how to get their browser randomly selected the most among people who don't care what browser they use. So that they can claim that their browser is used more. How does that make any sense?
The object of this ballot system is to let users know that a choice even exists. It's not to promote any specific competitor. You seem to overlook the fact that there are people out there (and quite a few, I might add) that don't know they have a choice. They don't know what a browser is. They just know they click that specific icon to get on the internet. They don't know there is an internet separate from the web. A lot of computer users have very limited knowledge.
As to why they should know, that is everything to do with economics. You can go read about that in depth, but the gist of it is that information is the lifeblood of a market (particularly an information market). The more nuanced an understanding the average participant has of the marketplace, the healthier that market will be. This is because as sophistication grows in the market, the options must become refined to compete. To put that in terms of browsers, as more browsers compete they all become standards-compliant and have to differentiate on other factors such as speed, security, extensions, portability (both the browser and the data), and so on.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
If browser selection screens are consumer friendly why doesn't Chrome OS have one?
Because Google has not been convicted of illegally using Chrome OS's monopoly market share to dominate the browser market. For that to even be possible, Chrome OS would first have to achieve a monopoly.
There's too many people in this discussion acting surprised that Microsoft is being held to a different standard. Yes, Microsoft IS being treated differently here. It's not because a bunch of Windows-haters are running the EU. It's because they are a convicted monopolist. They have already caused problems and broken laws, and now being forced to do things that Google is not being forced to do is part of their punishment. There's nothing unfair about this. Microsoft is not on equal ground compared to other companies that are not convicted monopolists. Please stop acting shocked that there are two different standards in effect.