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Microsoft Giving Rival Browsers a Lift
gollum123 tips an article at the NY Times on the progress of the European Windows browser choice screen that we have been discussing recently. "Rivals of Microsoft's market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch. Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is the strongest competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer worldwide, said that more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox via a 'choice screen' that has been popping up on Windows-equipped computers in Europe since the end of last month. ... Opera Software, based in Oslo, said downloads of its browser in Belgium, France, Britain, Poland, and Spain had tripled since the screen began to appear. Microsoft said it was too early to tell whether the choice screen might prompt significant numbers of users to change. The digital ballot is being delivered over the Internet with software updates, and it is expected to take until mid-May to complete the process. The browser choice will also be presented to buyers of new Windows computers across the European Union for five years."
Opera hasn't had ads for years. It is totally free as in beer.
September 20, 2005
Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser.
The script on that page uses a proper shuffle algorithm now (Fisher-Yates/Durstenfeld). If the page is viewed without Javascript, the order is fixed though, with IE being in the leftmost spot...
We all knew it would happen. If you know that X leads to Y and you also know that you will be doing X in Z time, then you know that, in said Z time, Y will happen.
X Y Z Means eXtreme eYebally microZoft, of course.
Seriously, though, this was really expected. It's not that people actually like the browsers in such cases, but they just randomly click. I've had my grandfather randomly picking Firefox already; I've had my grandmother clicking an add that says "You are visitor 1M, you win a big prize!". It's the fact that many people are still "ignorant" or careless towards this question.
The dialog pops-up: "CHOOSE THY BROWSER".
Reaction: "What the hell is a browser? Choose? I just want to 'surf' the 'internet'. Hell, this one with the shiny colors and the fancy name should be good, I'll click it. [double-clicks instead of single-clicking]."
All in all, I'm glad that people are being given the choice. But, really, those of us who care about it, already had the means to do it; it's the fact that we're fucking upset that other people don't get pulled into using them...
Jorl has spoken. Now mod up/down/sideways.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
> Just a thought, how many people would use Internet Explorer if it didn't
> come with Windows?
Thousands. Probably even some who don't work for Microsoft.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What if I started a class action suit against Apple because Itunes is installed by default, and that is a "monopoly" on digital music storefronts?
You have your cart and horse backwards. First, iTunes the application is not a monopoly of any sort. OS X is not a monopoly of any sort. That leaves iTunes the service, which as a lot of market share in the US. That means Apple can't bundle OS X with that service, but they don't they bundle the application with the OS and tie the service to the application.
If Apple required OS X to use iTunes, you'd have a case. If Apple forced people to buy a copy of OS X to buy a song on iTunes, you'd have a case. In fact though, Apple is moving iTunes to a Web interface to remove the tie with the application as they approach monopoly levels of market share... Which is probably the best you could hope for from any lawsuit regarding it. Apple can't leverage OS X's monopoly influence to promote iTunes because OS has no monopoly influence. Apple isn't leveraging iTunes service monopoly to promote anything in particular.
What the fuck is society coming to.
It is now and always has been a clamoring crowd of ignorance. People who insist on expressing their uneducated opinions without bothering to understand the topic even superficially first.