Details Emerge On EU-Only "Browser Choice" Screen For Windows

Simmeh writes "Microsoft have posted screenshots and details on their upcoming 'web browser choice screen.' Requirements include being in Europe, and having Internet Explorer set as your default browser. It comes with a few surprises, as the software automatically unpins Internet Explorer from your taskbar, and offers 11 alternative browsers."

Comments

11 browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

11 browsers? how many of them have >1%market penetration? This is going to confuse the less versed users and I bet one ballmer's chair this is intentional, divide et impera

Re:11 browsers

[dave562]

I challenge you to name the top 11 browsers off the top of your head without searching for them. Go. 11 browsers. Other users of "this space" are waiting.

Re:11 browsers

[CannonballHead]

Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, K-Meleon, Konqueror, SeaMonkey, IceWeasel, and that's about all I can name.

Of course, IceWeasel and SeaMonkey are forks of Firefox I guess. On the whole, I agree with the GP - offering 11 browsers is ridiculous. Unfortunately, that was probably the only way to be "fair" to everyone... except the end user.

I would have rather had the EU tell Microsoft "You can keep your browser but you have to get it up to current standards." THAT would have accomplished something good.

Re:More to come

[iammani]

Actually OEMs should be forced to offer those, not Microsoft. Too bad it wont happen, as Apple will not take it up with EU. And Linux distors are not powerful enough to take it up.

Re:More to come

[shutdown -p now]

If you mandate OEMs to install it, should they also be mandated to support it?

Re:More to come

[RightSaidFred99]

Lol. "Forced" huh? Based on what moral or legal code besides the "I'm angry!" code?

Re:More to come

[RightSaidFred99]

Of course they should! Linux dweebs will help them with friendly, free online advise like "You're an idiot" and "Duuh, you don't know how to peruse /proc to find out which revision of your chipset you're using, you numbskull noob!?".

Pointless

[Sir_Sri]

Lovely, so now a bunch of tech savvy people are going to be getting calls asking how to make these screens go away and never come back.

Users don't want choice, they don't want complexity, menus are complexity. Even that stupid setup menu on IE when you first install it scares the hell out of people and they just have to keep clicking 'not right now' or whatever it is EVERY time they start the application because they don't know how to make it go away. They want shit that does its thing that they don't have to think about and for whatever they're doing IE already does that. If you have enough know how to not use IE already, you don't. If you don't have the know how sticking some other choice for you there is just going to break stuff and confuse people. I feel bad for people who will accidentally choose google chrome or safari and then not have a clue how to use it, and not have a clue how to immediately revert the system to what they did have that let them do whatever they were doing.

Not a bad concept in the 'when it's installed' sense, and on purely legal basis it makes sense, but it's not the sort of thing you want to be pushing out to live OS's that people are actually using right now. Even then putting anything other than IE8 on tends to be risky, everything is designed to work in IE, less so with firefox and way less so with any other choice, that's going to hobble people who suddenly have a new browser and no idea how to make it work.

Re:Pointless

[mr_lizard13]

everything is designed to work in IE, less so with firefox and way less so with any other choice

Whilst I think that's not really the case these days (5 years ago perhaps), I really can't see how people will find a browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc any more difficult to use than IE.

They all have navigation buttons, some sort of address/search bar, tabs, etc etc.

They all work very well. They all work with all the important plugins. And they all look and function more or less the same.

Some would argue that they function better than the leading browser, too.

I understand what you mean though about menus and choices adding complexity. But really, this ballot screen ain't that hard to figure out. Computers have to present the user with a choice from time to time. They're not appliances. At some point, the user will have to make a choice about something.

Not ideal, but better than letting IE get a free ride. The web gets better for everyone the more choice there is, even if that means confusing a few million people.

Re:Pointless

[Sir_Sri]

They all work very well... for people who know what address bars and tabs are.

Seriously, you're setting the bar way higher than the average user.

Plugins? What's a plugin? Why is this asking me to download something? How do I install something? Ever tried to install flash in firefox? You have to download and run an executable, it terrifies people, they don't know if the site they're getting it from might be hacked, the usually don't know how to find the file they've downloaded to run it. If it doesn't just run on it's own it's too hard for the average user.

Firefox and opera certainly function better on sites *I* visit than say my 70 year old father and his wife. The websites I visit are built for people with the assumption they might not use IE. But my dad's wife manages to find these odd flash game sites that never work right in anything other than IE. And they run their computer on a 20 inch monitor in 800x600 mode because well, it makes everything look bigger, so they can read it better. Good luck getting webpages designed for the young tech savy firefox user to behave nicely in 800x600 (except google).

To anyone capable of reading, the menu screen shouldn't be hard, but it is. It causes regular users to panic and look for a 'get me the fuck away from here' button. It's how all the phishing/internet security 2010 type attacks succeed unfortunately. People want appliances. They're scared of choices they aren't capable of making in an informed fashion.

Like I say, it's the sort of thing that makes sense on a new computer. People *expect* and accept that on a new computer they will have to learn a new of way of doing things and learn new stuff. On average even my first year university students panic when something shows up with different settings than they're used to. If they expect it to be the same they don't want new. And even then, when presented with the choice, they aren't going to want to rock the boat.

Re:irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey retard, Windows update has been out of IE for a while.

Why don't you take the time to learn something about the products that you're ranting against instead of looking like a total asshat? Or is that too hard for you to do?

Re:Try it out

[SoonerSkeene]

Why did it take Microsoft this long to create this choice page? It's 5 minutes of coding. The fact that this took this many months to be put together really shows how slow anything at Microsoft moves.

Re:Post-ballot data

[Patik]

Except that most people think that blue E is literally "the internet", while the other logos (besides Google's name) will be somewhat alien to them.

Re:javascript randomness

[TheLink]

If you already have javascript disabled (partially or totally) and can actually see that page then:

a) You have already chosen a non-IE browser
b) You have javascript disabled and you know what you are doing (and have as many different browsers as you want)
c) The organization that provided you the computer system has already chosen the browser for you.
d) The organization that provided you the computer system has disabled javascript and you're not supposed to enable it, much less change the browser.
e) You're using the wrong computer - go use your own PC.
f) You're some really fringe corner case.

Re:Post-ballot data

[B2382F29]

Why do Americans think that the EU is only crushing American companies?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_(psychology)

Re:Post-ballot data

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do Americans think that the EU is only crushing American companies?

Because America is built upon paranoia. Their government has convinced its people that everyone is against them and they must do everything to protect their paranoid delusions and self containment.

Re:Post-ballot data

[Spatial]

There are other reasons. In America, corporate fines happening in other countries are not generally reported in the news unless the fines are being applied to an American company. To the casual observer it creates the illusion that only those companies are being fined.

In short, be aware of just how insular the news is, or you will be severely mislead.