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Windows Browser Ballot: the Winners and the Losers
Barence writes "It's a year since the Windows browser ballot came into being in Europe — but has it made any difference? PC Pro has surveyed the minor browser makers — who theoretically had the most to gain from the ballot — to find out what impact it's had on their business. The answers are very mixed. One of the 12, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, claims it's resulted in fewer than 200 downloads per day. Others claim it's transformed their business. One thing is for certain: the big boys still dominate."
the slope of that green line. Anyone wanna estimate an (y=mx+b) m for me? :D
Did note the part about measuring Safari usage by adding in OSX machines when comparing browsers. Statistical reporting at its best. (/sarcasm)
I ran the browser usage by year through a spreadsheet a couple of months ago and found the same thing. The decline in Internet Explorer usage was remarkably consistent over the years. The EU's browser choice appeared to make no difference in the usage deltas for all the browsers. I didn't look at the less used browsers, but I imagine that they would be the true winners because hardly anybody would have heard of the minor players if it weren't for being on this list.
It just goes to show that the reason that IE got to have so much dominance was not because it was bundled with the operating system, but that for far too long it had no real competition.
....so Link P thinks its unfair that they arent chosen.
Lets be real here for a moment.....It might have been a bit unfair that MS had a stranglehold on the browser market for those PCs that had Windows pre-installed. Choice is good, and it's great that the EU evened the playing field. But too many choices will confuse the general public
As a PC support tech, i'd have to argue that average joe consumer wants/needs a browser that will handle everything you throw at it. The top 5 in that list will do just that for the most part or they have a simple add-on scheme that handle's the rest. As internet technologies mature bloat is the way to go. If a customer says to me "my internet wont do this...." its not appropriate for me to say "well, you chose a browser that doesnt have that feature." A company that markets a product as a SlimBrowser sounds like it would put me in that very position.
If you design a browser with a niche feature set(ie. Bare bones browsing) dont complain when the mass market doesnt choose your product
Alas, the difference between -1 troll and +5 funny is, ultimately, a matter of split second timing.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Yeah yeah, extrapolating future trends by drawing a straight line between past points. That is SUCH a reliable method.
But hey, good news, by these figures IE will be at 0% in 5 years and Google at well over a 100%.
The browser ballot changed things, would the lines have been as they are now without it? Nobody knows but it is not beyond imagination that IE would have bottomed out 50% instead and might even have climbed with the release of IE9.
Basically, those who claim the ballot did not have an affect are claiming something like the new iPhone had no effect on iPhone sales. The old one was selling well, the new one sells well, ergo no change... because the old one would of course have done the same sale figures without a new release.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Of course many smaller browsers didn't get much of a turn out- everyone knows to cast your ballot for one of the front runners or you're wasting your vote.
My webcomic
Extrapolation: because past performance perfectly predicts future growth.
AFAIK even if you chose to install one of the other browsers, IE still ends up being installed on your computer, but it may not be the default. Firing up certain applications within the Windoze environment (nope, can't name them at the moment as I try to stay away from M$ when I can) still bring the IE engine online for their requisite web component. Windows update still keeps throwing IE in the update list and if you're not switched on it will be installed automatically. There is still a lot of bias towards IE in my opinion and I personally feel that IE should not even be allowed to be included on any M$ O/S distribution media - when you first fire up a new O/S you should be presented with a choice window for which you wish to install (with the browsers listed in order according to user reviews or similar, rather than just "Let's put IE first, then FireFox, then Chrome, then who really cares as most users won't look past that point. No - I'm not a M$ Hate Bunny, just personally don't like using their products if I can possibly avoid it. I'd rather pay to subsidize Linux development (via donations as I see fit) than put money in Bill's pocket.
Fuck off and get back to your plastic processed cheese and Budweiser horse piss.
If you're going to reference someone's cheese with quotes it should be American cheese.
The problem with the minor browsers is perhaps perception. Chrome has been successfully marketed as a leading edge "shiny" must have browser, and it's market share has risen accordingly. Opera on the other hand with its "we're the most compliant" attitude is perhaps perceived as a slightly dowdy tech-heads choice, and its market share has been a bit flat.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"by Anonymous Coward writes: on Sunday February 27, @04:58AM" Either you are yourself a Eurotrash-troll or have nothing better to do at 4:58am on the US East Coast. (1:58am on the west coast)
I know there's lots of google fan boys on Slashdot, but I find it frightening that Chrome use has been growing so much. Google already has a very powerful market presence on the web, and I don't think putting them in charge of your browser is a good idea. They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
The choice to use Firefox is obvious because it's the best browser. But people should stick with Firefox anyway because it's OPEN SOURCE, and no corporation could abuse the power of it's market share for that fact alone. Do the right thing. Migrate your clients and friends and family to open source, and start with Firefox first, because it IS THE BEST, and easiest to use browser, and runs on all 4 major operating systems. Then after that go for Libre Office (perfect example of the nature of Open Source killing evil corporation right there, "Good BYE Open Office!!"), and then eventually get your people onto Linux Mint. It's the best OS already, and 9 times out of 10 people will come to love it's stability, speed, ease of use, and inherently preferable nature due to it's FOSS character.
The fact that so many people are still on Mac and Windows really speaks volumes to the pathetic and immoral nature of the human mind, and the lazy weakness that pervades society and allows so many problems and corporate slavery to continue and flourish unhindered.
Do the right thing. Upgrade to FOSS, and start with Firefox. Not SOLELY because it's FOSS, but because it's also the best. Oh, and while you're at it, install Adblock and send an extra FUCK YOU to the corporations that are destroying all the ecosystems on the planet, our basic human rights, health, and happiness, and the democracies that so many of our ancestors labored and died to create.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I'm not sure if you're focusing that at one particular browser or just your disappointment with the whole add-on culture that helps browsers do what they should be able to do in the first place. Either way I can't see how you blame this on someone who's a doctor, milkman and delivers pizza. He's certainly doing his jobs (unlike, say, some browsers I know).
I'm curious, where is this "ballot screen", anyway?
I'm from Germany. I just bought a laptop a month or two ago; it came with windows 7 preinstalled (naturally: try getting a laptop from a major manufacturer that doesn't come with windows preinstalled). Browser-wise, it had IE installed on it, and that was it.
I fired up IE precisely once, to download an alternative browser, and I've been using that instead ever since. But I sure as heck didn't get a "browser ballot" screen where I could choose my preferred browser, or even any sort of hint that there are alternatives in the first place.
Of course, *I* didn't need either, but if it had been my 68-year old aunt instead who only recently got her first computer ever, it wouldn't even have occurred to her that there might be other browsers. And if it had, chances are she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of firing up IE just for downloading an alternative and installing that (which would probably have exceeded her abilities, anyway). And isn't that the situation where the "ballot screen" is supposed to help?
So, where is it? I've never seen it. I've never heard of any seeing it, personally. It keeps getting mentioned on Slashdot on occasion, but that's the only place I've encountered it.
Where is it?
"I hear the internet connectivity in the USA is great, you have so many options that you can choose and the competition between ISPs is so fierce that my 80mbps connection must seem like dial-up to you. I mean if one ISP starts capping the connection or offers only DSL you can just move to some other ISP..."
HA! You're wrong. Not everyone has the options to switch. For example in my area, Cable is the only cheapest and fastest. DSL is not possible due to 20K ft. distance. WISPs are not close enough. FIOS isn't here even though the city has it. I can go with dial-up (3 KB/sec at about 28.8k speed even on 56k modems), satellite TVs, IDSL (144Kb/sec both ways), etc. but those are either too slow or too expensive (e.g, over 100 bucks per month for IDSL excluding setup fees). Everyone has cable for broadband Internet here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So I'm still waiting for the EU to require Apple to have a browser ballot upon Mac OS first boot.... I won't hold my breath though.
Perhaps the reason FlashPeak SlimBrowser gets so few downloads is because the web site looks exactly like those shady download sites that scrape and index all the freeware and demos, are full of ads and/or spyware.
If they invested $29 in a modern and professional-looking template, maybe a few screenshots and better promotional text, they'd see more conversions. Policy alone can't convince people to trust you if your image is that of a 3rd world splog.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What's the point when all the alternatives, beside the big 5, all use IE as a rendering engine? If you use a browser that uses IE as its rendering engine, you may as well just use IE.
But Netscape was cheated out of the market, and the market was cheated out of the superior browser, by Microsoft.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
I cannot believe that they left out the Lynx win32 port. Total terminal discrimination.