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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."
How would you display them otherwise?
By number of units sold - IE would be first as it comes with all operating systems, and they're all free now
By the letter of the alphabet - Is it "Microsoft Internet Explorer" or "Internet Explorer", "Firefox" or "Mozilla Firefox", how soon do you think a browser called "aaaaBrowser" will appear just to appear the first
By popularity or market share - based on who's stats... it's well known the expression here "Netcraft confirms it"
Random really does seem the best for now, and as long as these 5 browsers are not hardcoded... though it would be interesting if Microsoft would launch "Microsoft SilverlightBrowser" or something in Windows 2010 or something like that and as it's sold with the OS there will probably be two MS browsers in first 5
Overreact much? Display is random, it's not like it randomly chooses and installs one automatically. If that's what a user does, it's their problem.
What is doubly sad is that Opera has exclusive contracts with many cellphone and others companies that ensure the Opera browser is the only one on that platform yet they bitch about this.
There go my mod points...
We could breath new life into the text editor market, casual picture editing market, file compression market, file browser market, music player market, etc.
Do you understand why IE is a problem?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade. After dropping support for other platforms, it effectively meant that many web pages were Windows-only. This was sometimes through no fault of their own, simply because they tested it with IE and assumed that worked. Sometimes it was deliberate -- why waste time supporting less than 5% of the population, when 95% can view your page?
Only when Firefox started seriously threatening its marketshare did IE start to improve, and it has done so incredibly slowly, compared to any of its rivals.
Yet even now, the damage has been done. To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
To compound this problem, you do kind of need a web browser to download another web browser. So even if I wanted to make a conscious choice to use, say, Firefox, I'd have to visit the Firefox download page from IE. It isn't as though Microsoft can reasonably be expected to ship an OS without a browser, unless we leave it up to the manufacturers, as most users would not know how to use ftp at the commandline to get Firefox.
So this is a sane solution to a real problem.
Compare this to your other examples. It isn't as though Notepad royally screws up text -- recent versions probably even handle Unicode properly, and even if we all adopt the defacto Microsoft standard of CRLF, it's not hurting anything -- nor is there a significant monopoly problem with text editors. And if notepad isn't there, you can download something else.
Same with casual picture editing. Download Paint.net or Gimp, and even if you don't, it's not as though there's some scandal with the png and jpeg file formats that makes them a nightmare to work with because some asshat breaks the standard every chance they get.
File compression? Standards work, there isn't a monopoly problem, and you don't need a file compression utility to download a file compression utility.
And so on.
Where do I sign up to have the VB 3 based browser I wrote in 8th grade added?... GIMP/MyFirstPictureEditor
What's the marketshare of your browser? How well does it support standards? Where's the indication that it's a legitimate choice?
Is there any indication that Gimp is a monopoly of anything, or that it's abused that monopoly power?
randomly populate lopsided projects like Gnome/KDE... MySQL/Postgres, vi/emacs
Because that's so lopsided right now. Also, what standards has Gnome created that KDE breaks? They seem to cooperate pretty well. MySQL and PostgreSQL seem to both support standard SQL, and vi/emacs seem to both support Unicode well enough.
Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris/Hurd
This is the only analogy that comes close to making sense -- yet all of these seem to support POSIX and X11 decently well.
On a serious note, when has choice in Linux ever been randomized?
When has any needed to be? Come to think of it, when has Linux, or anything currently running on Linux, ever abused monopoly power, or had a monopoly of anything to abuse?
On a serious note, I actually think it would be a bit easier to simply force Windows to ship without a browser, and let the OEMs sort it out, but I don't have much of a problem with the "random ballot" -- other than that it's going to lead to the best marketing winning, not the best software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Isn't everything Microsoft includes in their OS damaging to competing markets?
I mean, and this isn't even hypothetical, if no Notepad came with Windows, there'd be many, dozens of alternatives with marginally more features. This was the case even when Windows just came out, that applications with hardly more features were on the market. I don't know about the state of calculators, but certainly Notepad and Wordpad killed an entire marketplace.
If Microsoft in a future version of Windows adds an Expose like functionality, or a virtual desktop functionality (like Mac's "Spaces", or Linux' typically built in virtual desktop functionality) will they be abusing their monopoly? Why? Both of their two largest competitors have those feature built in. What about search? Including decent search in Vista, and even better search in Windows 7 killed at least a handful of worse search engines. Heck, even Google Desktop was pretty significantly hurt by the release of Vista, as poor as the reception was. Windows 7 improves on the indexing and search, and goes further and adds search federation. Is that abusing their monopoly?
This is the problem. Microsoft produces an operating system and desktop environment. What people EXPECT in other operating systems and desktop environments far exceeds what the average Slashdotter would admit should be legal for Microsoft to include. When I run Mac OS X, I expect a lot, ditto with Linux. Yet, for Microsoft to even come close to feature parity would be many, many lawsuits waiting to happen.
The choice has always been there, albeit more complicated to make. The issue has been that Microsoft has promoted their browser through their operating system monopoly, leading to unfair competition, not that people haven't been given a choice per se.
I personally don't think it is a big issue whether the ballot should be random or not. It sounds more like they are quibbling about details. But if the goal is to remove the leverage MS has through controlling the operating system, I'd say a random ballot ought to be more "fair" than letting MS pick the order. Sure, those who don't care will get a random browser, but why should MS be given the advantage of getting (more of) those users?