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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.
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Extrapolation: because past performance perfectly predicts future growth.
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.
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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.
You do know that Google Chrome is a branded (and who-knows-how-changed) version of the OPEN SOURCE Chromium, right?
As for the choice to use Firefox being obvious because it's the best browser ... funny, for me it's only the third choice (the first being Opera, which is leaving me quite disgruntled due to the rendering bugs and memory leaks that started showing up in version 11, the second being Chromium, i.e. the open source browser on which Google Chrome is based, and Firefox being only the last option if nothing else works).
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
I'm not saying that they necessarily are, but it's possible they may be one of the few companies that realizes that long term profit can be made by providing good services to your users and not screwing them over in the short term. I don't think making money is inherently Evil, it's pretty much the same as you or me getting paid to do our job.
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?
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.
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