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."

Comments

That agrees with my figures

[Gadget_Guy]

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.

Re:That agrees with my figures

[kevinmenzel]

And since none of the major browser trends changed with the introduction of the Ballot, it also shows that the entire situation was overblown, and that there was a competitive market in place which was (and is) correcting the mistake of leaving IE uncontested for so long.

Re:That agrees with my figures

[oliverthered]

I think it could be described as too late in some ways.... what would have happened if this was in there from the start?
would it have created a more equal market for competition to develop in. overblown, it's been what 10 years?

Re:That agrees with my figures

[icebraining]

So the main goal of a for-profit company should be to develop an equal marketplace for its competitors?

No, the main goal should be to make as much profit as possible without abusing its dominant position on a market by manipulating other markets.

This was just Europe showing a US company who was boss. If Ikea made Windows, this would never have happened.

OK, then show us an example where a company in the EU was abusing a dominating position in a market by tying another product to it. Competition law is applied to EU based companies all the time.

When can we see Apple told how to conduct its business by some fascists?

By fascists? I have no idea. But the EU already said Apple can't prevent developers from porting the same apps they sell on the Apple Store to other platforms.

Link A has more hits than link B

[metalmaster]

....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

Re:Link A has more hits than link B

[Pentium100]

It looks like SlimBrowser uses the IE engine*, so it probably supports whatever IE does.

* the system requirements for SlimBrowser say:

Windows 98 or above with at least Internet Explorer 5.0. Internet Explorer 8.0 is recommended for improved performance and security.

So it probably uses the IE rendering engine. AFAIK, the security and performance of Firefox, Opera or Chrome do not depend on which version of IE I have.

Re:Link A has more hits than link B

[houghi]

But too many choices will confuse the general public

Yet limiting their choices is NOT an option. I am 'confused' by the amount of stores I can buy things. I am 'confused' by the sorts of food I can buy. Clothes, computers, cars, camera's, women... All things where I am 'confused' by the choice I have.

Yet I rather be confused than somebody else make the choice for me.

Re:Link A has more hits than link B

[Pentium100]

Microsoft has a monopoly in the desktop OS market. And yes, monopoly does not mean that MS is the only supplier, it means that it has very large market share and as such, it influences the market and can influence other markets more so than some other company.

Let's say that Microsoft made it so that WebM video codec (or, say, Firefox) does not work on Windows. Very few people will change their OS just to use the single program that does not work, so the result would be that the market share of Firefox or WebM would decrease sharply. On the other hand, if some Linux distribution made it so that it was not possible to run Wine (and in turn, windows programs) or h.264, the impact on the usage of those programs would not change much (even assuming that everyone stayed with their distribution).

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...

Microsoft makes a good OS (well, somehow people are buying and using it, so it must be good or Microsoft somehow manages to make it happen wven though the OS is not that good), but it should not have the power to dictate other markets (what if it made Windows only compatible with Intel CPUs, or just AMD CPUs? Should it hold that much power over the CPU manufacturers?)

Same thing with the browser. A lot of people do not know what a "browser" is, they just use the blue "e" to get to the internet. IE is not the best browser (IE8 is Ok, but this started when the newest IE version was 6) and it is not compatible with the standards, so web designers have to make pages compatible with IE and the standard browsers or they would lose clients. That's why the EU made Microsoft offer users a choice, it was hoped that some of the users would find out about the choice that they have (if someone uses IE because he prefers it, the menu was just a one time annoyance, for others, it offered a choice).

Someone will now say that notepad, paint and other programs are the same, so you have to offer choices on them too. Well, no. First of all, the other programs are basic and they do their job well, also, they are compatible with standard formats, so there is no harm in users continuing to use them, unlike IE, especially IE6.

Got to love lousy statisticians

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Got to love lousy statisticians

[fermion]

What we do see from the chart is that everyone won because it appeared that many made a choice, and when they did over half of them went with a browser that was not MS.

It also appears that over time the share of non-MS browser stayed pretty consistent. This indicates that we are going to have a healthy standards based market as no firm is going to develop specifically for MS, or Chrome, given that they will automatically lose a majority of their potential customers.

It also appears that Chrome growth might be limited. Google has the money to pull people away from IE, but not other browsers. This and other evidence shows that, despite, or perhaps due to Chrome legitimizing non-IE browsers, Firefox has market share that would be considered outlandish a year ago, and other browsers are holding their own. Therefore Google is competing for the 60% of the market or so that IE controlled when Chrome came on the scene Given that other browsers are still growing, some of which will be consumed by them.

We see, again, it is unlikely a fully dominant browser wil emerge. MS has the money to keep Google from taking over the market. It may be in a year Firefox will be the top browser, albeit with minority market share, with Google and MS fighting to be #2. Safari and Opera would fighting for a distant place 4 and 5.

Of course downloads does not a user make. I have many browsers in my computer. I mostly use Camino,but launch others for particular sites.

Obligatory XKCD

[rsmith-mac]

Extrapolation: because past performance perfectly predicts future growth.

Re:Chrome growth is frightening.

[TeXMaster]

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).

Re:I like

[pandrijeczko]

Personally, I think Safari should be lumped in with "Other" because usage of it on Windows is so insignificant.