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The Seven Hidden Browsers In the Windows Ballot
Barence writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft started rolling out a Windows update within the European Union, giving every Internet Explorer user the option to switch browsers. As well as the five big names, anyone who scrolls the ballot window to the right will find seven further browsers, none of which is exactly a household name. There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area. But what are these unknown browsers actually like? To find out, seven PC Pro staff installed a browser each, used it exclusively for a day, and ran a variety of tests. The browser-by-browser verdict on the hidden seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
Users would be better off with IE8 than any of those pieces of crap.
They'd be better off with FF or Chrome too, but by requiring a full selection, users are presented with all kinds of bad software.
I like my web browsing outdated, thank you very much.
Now get off my lawn.
Hey! Where's Lynx?
Avant browser is nothing more than a front-end for IE.
It's basically a window surrounding an embedded Internet Explorer object.
I personally think its ridiculous that MS offers it as an 'alternative browser'
Y
Thank you of informing us of your preferred way of browsing The Internet in this completely unrelated discussion.
Your contribution will be valued just as dearly as in all of the other places where we're to deal with your uninspiring insight into the mind of someone with OCD.
I would wish that there was a community for people like you, where every topic can successfully have fifty of you posting your browsing preferences as the answer to any question, including "how do I test my 7 year old daughter for pregnancy" and "what is this big piece of metal doing in my stomach and how do I get it out?"
Many of these are the IE rendering engine wrapped in a new user interface. They appeared in the days when IE development was dead and provided useful things like tabs and popup blocking, while staying compatible with the IE6-only websites that used to be everywhere.
Maxthon for one is very popular in China because it supports ActiveX which many Chinese banking websites rely on (bleh), and it is much nicer to use than IE6. I am not sure how it compares to IE8 though.
See Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. Got to help someone with his Windows-PC lately and got seriously confused by this invasive dialog. :-)
"There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area." .. just like there's no quality control for presidents and prime ministers I suppose, except the fact that they are the most widely-voted politicians in a given area .. draw your own conclusions as to whether it works, or more importantly if there is a better option.
I'm surprised that the twelve most commonly used browsers include several that I hadn't heard about (most of which are not that good, if one is to believe TFA) but do not include SeaMonkey. Perhaps it is too much like Firefox+Thunderbird for people to actually want to use it.
So what? This is about remedying anti-competitive practices. "Our product is better than theirs so they should be locked out of the market" is not a valid defense to an anti-trust lawsuit.
From TFA:
we installed each browser on the same Windows 7 computer and tested their speed in the SunSpider benchmark, their memory usage with the Google home page open in a single tab, and their startup times – measured from the moment we clicked the icon to the browser window appearing.
Expectation for any sort of consistency in the testing parameters has been set to zero. But, at least we get to see which browsers are most-liked and offer a nice user experience, right?
Then we asked seven members of the PC Pro team to abandon their favoured browser and switch to one of these alternatives. To say they were delighted to do so would be a lie: there was gnashing of teeth, wailing and screaming pleas for mercy. All these fell on deaf ears. We provide full reviews of each browser in the Reviews section, but for a helpful summary click through to the next page.
OK, expectation of any sort of positive review of any browser has been set to zero.
The only consolation is that the popularity of the top 12 browsers is re-examined every six months.
Which means PCPro will have a steady ad revenue from writing meaningless reviews cobbled from the barest minimum of testing where the browser used by the least whiny of the random-picked team gets top marks just because that person hates change the least.
In fact, maybe a PC Pro browser is exactly what the EU needs
If it's written with the same attention and care to detail as the articles, the first installed instance of it will crash the Internet and bring civilization to a smoking ruin.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I use lynx you insensitive clod!
just be glad he isn't describing how he likes to shove a cucmber up his ass while masturbating to the sears' catalog.
MS are INTENSIVELY advertising IE8 now on tv in the UK. The only advertising I've even heard of from the others is google chrome billboard ads (so no market penetration round here in the countryside)
users won't read the descriptions, they will just chose the one they've heard of, which is IE8
now if Mozilla threw millions of quid at TV advertising...
For some reason, I was reminded of Legend of the Red Dragon when they mentioned:
Internet Explorer LOSES 10 CHARM!
Internet Explorer IS NOW KNOWN AS GreenBrowser.
I played that BBS game/MUD in my senior year of high school, though the sysadmin chose to "upgrade" me a few times for some reason.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
They ran it through one Javascript test (SunSpider), so that’s at least something, I suppose.
Their other “benchmarks” are woefully lacking in the usefulness department. They gave the startup time (in seconds)... I’m much more interested in how quickly pages load. They gave the memory requirement at startup (with Google loaded as the homepage)... I’m much more interested in how much memory it’s consumed after a few hours of browsing.
Not to mention that certain browsers (*cough* IE) take way longer to give you a usable browser than they do to just display the window. That’s just the same trick of showing your desktop while Windows finishes loading; it looks like it accomplished something, but you still can’t click anything yet.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
a desktop link to http://www.browserchoice.eu/
have you been defaced today?
"the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
One of them must be Internet Explorer. :)
Probably version 6. I know it's "dead" but like a JRPG boss, it will keep coming back until we kill the evil mastermind behind it.
MS is simply doing as told and it appears to be bending over backwards to comply with what the EU thinks everyone wants. How is it MS's job to help you choose another browser...they offer the option to pick a different one after that your own your own.
Is why they are going after Microsoft exclusively and why only browsers.
Every OS on the planet has a list of software they have bundled with them.
Their is nothing wrong with this, sure I do not like using pretty much everything MS bundles with windows, but I would not want to spend huge amounts of time configuring it during installation and still only be offered the top X of the market share.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I think this setup is working. It is creating real competition. Sure, the seven browsers offered right now are crap, but before MS was forced to offer choices, these browsers would have zero exposure. There was little incentive to try to update any browser that wasn't backed by someone with deep pockets. So, no one tried. Most of these are simple pet projects. Now, developers might be interested. Investors have a way to inexpensively get software in front of millions of users. These choices will only get better. The barrier to entry has been lowered. Microsoft has been forced to compete with the little guy. Right now, the little guy is loosing, but these seven have nowhere to go, but up.
Score one for the EU. They had the balls to make change instead of just fining M$ millions of their billions.
From TFA:
"The agreement hammered out between Microsoft and the EC simply stipulated the “12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7” based on usage share in the European Economic Area"
This is a very clever strategy to purposely have a large number of mostly crap alternatives, just to bury Chrome and Firefox.
The randomised ordering of a large number of crap options just helps to ensure that the odds of anyone randomly picking a non-IE browser would more often end up with something worse than IE.
Microsoft are very clever to turn even this browser selector into something that is more not less likely to establish the incorrect opinion that IE is best overall and then have users who tried something else switch back to IR.
How is displaying 12 choices in an area that has a limited size that fits 5 of the 12 choices 'hiding' 7 choices?? I mean, that's like saying ./ 'hides' all but one comment. Oh yeah, there's this scroll-bar thingy, but that's for advanced users, right?
The article's review of K-Meleon stated most clearly what they were looking for:
"A browser that looks and performs like the software of yesteryear. Only an option for those running equally aged hardware."
Translation:
A browser that doesn't supply the flashy, cpu-maximizing eye candy that we like.
Of course, it's easy to understand that this is what's important to a lot of people. But those of us in the market for a sleek, compact browser that doesn't interfere with the important things that are also running on our machines, reviews like this simply tell us that we should find a different reviewer. Is there a review out there that compares these (and other) browsers on the basis of functionality, resource usage, and other more practical attributes?
(Of course, people like that probably aren't much using Windows 7, so maybe this article was a good review for most of the actual customer base. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Firefox is a great browser, but at the moment it seems to be stuck in a rut where it's talking about all these features coming out and none are available. There's no excuse for doing a home tab competition and then not putting out an extension that replicates the functionality. Opera has become a great browser with the release of 10.5, though I say that as a Windows 7 user who has a browser that feels like it fits my OS like a glove, and not one of OJ's. Chrome is a POS to me. It's ugly and usability is baffling. I have no idea how to see previous sites (i.e. pull down the address bar). But it's a good choice third browser.
... the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like.
The "other five" are there to make IE8 look good by comparison as well as infer that all alternative browsers are inferior while making Microsoft look magnanimous and unafraid of competition.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I wanted to mod you flamebait because this stupid argument you're having has nothing to do with the actual topic at hand than it does with you being right.
:P
In the end, I didn't, because I normally like reading your posts and you probably don't deserve the karma hit, but for fuck's sake, have a little bit of humility. At the heart of the argument, you're wrong, and BadAnalogyGuy is right. And he didn't even have to make a BadAnalogy(TM) to prove his point.
Someone mod this troll so only C64Love has to read it
RTFA, it was related. OP was responding to TFA's characterization of some of the ballot browsers being poor because they were outdated.
Microsoft is probably hoping that the large number of browsers will confuse people so much that they'll stick with IE.
The big problem with that list is they are mostly rebranded or "wrapped" browsers, meaning they take the Trident or Gecko rendering engine, put their own chrome around it and pass it off as their own. Maxthon and Avant, for example, were at least slightly more popular back in the days of IE 5/6, as they offered tabbed browsing, enhanced ActiveX security and a few other creature comforts long before IE7 was ever announced.
Flock is a Firefox wrapper with a bunch of (proprietary) addons for social media sites. Now, I'm not too big on social media so I can't really offer valid critique, but the idea seemed a bit goofy and the whole project seems like a weak attempt to cash in on the MySpace/Facebook buzz. YMMV
So in the end, you really have four choices, each with a few trim options: IE, Firefox, Webkit, Opera. No one really has the patience to write a new engine anyway, the web is such a clusterfuck of broken standards and copy-paste web "designers" that it's near-impossible to get anywhere by starting from scratch.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I am sure Opera is great. But is isn't so much better than Firefox that I am willing to give up all my plug ins. In a way Opera reminds me of an Apple product. They believe that it does exactly what it should do and how it should do it. The user can not change that and it is for their own good.
I am not even saying that they are wrong but it just doesn't fit me as well as Firefox with my few plugins do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If some of you are feeling left out, because you are using Linux or MacOS X. Here are sites listing alternative web browsers for your platforms:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers_for_Unix_and_Unix-like_operating_systems
- http://www.pure-mac.com/webb.html
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I remember using that when it first came out. Quick history: Netscape 2 and 3 we good browsers with a decent news & mail reader. Then they were all like "Hey, let's make a suite!" and that was Netscape 4. Then Netscape went open-source and eventually released a suite that was SLOW AS HELL. (New, unoptimized code, and that suite had everything but the kitchen sink.) People started saying "Hey, you should strip all the crap off and make a lean little browser." They did, and that was Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. But before that was out, there was K-Meleon, a standalone browser with Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Good stuff, for a very short while. I used it for a bit but when Phoenix came out (I started using it at 0.2) it was pretty great right away and the rest is history.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
They are just Trident or Gecko, wrapped in a minimal different UI.
Which in case of Trident (IE’s “engine’) is very very bad.
Avant, Slimbowser, GreenBrowser, Maxthon do. They are basically just IE with a different look. K-Meleon and Flock use Gecko. (But Flock has a pretty different purpose, and therefore might be considered legitimate.)
Sleipnir does them both.
You can even use Firefox with the Trident engine, by installing the IEtab add-on.
So there will be no shortage of IEs an sheep’s clothing anytime soon.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hear what you're saying about Opera, you only need to look at the fact that they refuse to support Yahoo Mail for evidence of their attitude.