Slashdot Mirror
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seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
I like my web browsing outdated, thank you very much.
Now get off my lawn.
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.