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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seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
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
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.
The choice of IE8 isn't being removed from those users. They can pick whichever browser they happen to prefer, if that happens to be IE8 then that's their prerogative. If they're incapable of picking the browser they prefer from a limited subset then they have more to worry about in the online environment than usability. In reality if these browsers are hidden initially, they're unlikely to ever be picked.
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.
And it's not like any of those top 5 browsers are much worse or better than another (ok IE aside for us nerds). Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari are all good browsers.
It seems Opera has increased it's market share most. It's probably the best choice too, since a casual user doesn't need to go finding all the different addons and other things he or she doesn't have any idea about. People seem to love it and stay with Opera. It's just that they didn't hear about it before, as Opera doesn't have such zealots as Firefox yelling all around how good their browser supposedly is and spamming fox pictures all over forums.
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."
A friend downloaded Firefox and installed it, then moan to me how Firefox looks and runs just like IE did and still does a bad job of rendering the web pages he looks at. I went over to investigate what he meant and the stupid fool was still double clicking the IE "E" icon on his desktop. When I asked why he was doing tjhis instead of the Firefox icon he said "But this is how I get the internet by click on the E" Doh
Chrome is SPYWARE! It is a horrible browser, it phones everything home to Google.
Sure it is good at browsing the web, but as a program it sucks!
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
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.
Opera doesn't have such zealots as Firefox yelling all around how good their browser supposedly is
You’re kidding, right?
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?
i wish i had mod points.. i dont care if you have to opt in to sending the data the fact that it even collects the data is what bothers me i dont trust google as far as i can throw them
I have had Opera for a long time and the thng is I just can not get comfortable with it.
I have been trying to move to Chrome for the extra speed and now that it has plugins I can get it working the way I want it to.
Truth is that I just can not kick the Firefox habit. I have the plugins I want and I don't have crash issues with it so it is in the Just works category.
The best plugin as far as making your browsing more stable? PDF download. Acrobat reader used to crash my system all the time.
PDF download combined with FOXIT seems to have fixed that little problem.
Opera is a good browser but so far it just hasn't been good enough to make me want to move.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Come up with one (single) instance of Google misusing customer data and I will henceforth refer to myself as a fool and stop using Google altogether. So will millions of others, I assume.
BTW, you know that Chrome's callback features can be disabled in the options menu, right? And if my memory serves, IE and Firefox also call home (less extensively).
You're kidding, right?
Give us credit for getting quieter when the claims that FireFox invented everything good about web browsing died down.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I can spy with my little eye something beginning with "all the google voicemail text where once indexed and made public"
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.
That’s weird... it specifically said that users who already didn’t use IE as their default browser weren’t supposed to see the choices screen.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
For most its not a matter of if Google has played nice with their customer data so far, its the fact that they have all of it to start with. Some people are just uncomfortable with google having access to so much about them and see it as potentailly orwellian, if its not already.
Knows where you are.
Has access to your e-mail.
Has access to your medical records.
Stores your word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.
Facilitates chat, voice and video conversations, as well as text messages.
Tracks what you search for and view on the Web.
Keeps track of your upcoming appointments.
Knows your contacts.
Knows what you read.
Knows what you buy.
And of course the tin-foil hat types will argue, how will we know if they are abusing it, they are in charge of the search engines most use to find out and we know they have no problems with censorship.
As for me I could care less at the moment, nothing to hide...but its still an encroachment on freedom and privacy, its not that hard to understand why some are concerned.
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"
*Whoosh* to you too.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
You’re kidding, right?
Of course he is. Everyone knows that Opera was the first web browser to have zealots - Firefox totally ripped that off.
Yeah, but Firefox totally did it better.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'm not sure why the parent is modded Flamebait.
It is true - these other browsers (and I use that term loosely - some of these are just wrappers around the IE engine) may be interesting to nerds and geeks for a variety of reasons but they offer minimal value to the average user.
It is nice for them to have exposure, but why expose users to bad software? I have tried some of these other browsers myself, specifically Sleipnir, Maxthon, and Avant. Saying that they're "not as good" is an understatement. They have a combined market share of less than 1% for a reason.
Users really are far better off using ANY of the top 5 than the bottom 7, and that includes IE8.
Love sees no species.
Clearly you haven't been following this topic for very long. The top 5 browsers are always on the first screen; though the order is randomized. (Though they didn't do it very well as you can read here: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser-ballot.html)
Essentially they have a list of highly popular browsers and a list of other browsers some people seem to use. They shuffle both lists then put the list of popular browsers first followed by the other list.
... 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