Windows Browser Ballot Glitch Cost Firefox 6-9 Million Downloads

nk497 writes "Microsoft's failure to include the EU browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1 cost Mozilla as many as 9 million Firefox downloads, the organization's head of business affairs revealed. Harvey Anderson said daily downloads of Firefox fell by 63% to a low of 20,000 before the ballot was reinstated, and after the fix, downloads jumped by 150% to 50,000 a day. Over the 18 months the ballot was missing, that adds up to six to nine million downloads — although it's tough to tell if the difference has more to do with Chrome's success or the lack of advertising on Windows systems. The EU is currently investigating the 'glitch,' and Microsoft faces a massive fine for failing to include the screen, which offers download details for different browsers to European Windows users, as part of measures ordered by the EU to balance IE's dominance."

Comments

Re:"glitch"

[Anonymous Coward]

Came here expecting this comment. You are boring, predictable, and in love with your preconceived opinions.

FUCK YOU.

Re:Really?

[hairyfeet]

To steal from Mel Brooks "Bullshit bullshit aaaaaaannnnd bullshit". This ain't 1999 anymore, MSFT ain't got a monopoly on shit. What are people buying? It ain't desktops and laptops, its smartphones and tablets. Hey Apple owns like 70%+ of that market, and as we saw with the Amazon VS the publishers case ALREADY has the power to influence the market...so where is THEIR browser screen? Why is iOS and OSX not being opened up?

Look at the numbers BEFORE the ballot, it shows the old joke was ohh so true "IE is the thing you use to download a browser" and has been falling like a rock since IE 7, how long ago was that?

This is a MONEY GRAB, pure and simple, there isn't a damned thing to fear from "Teh big bad M$" because they missed the fucking boat and are out of the mobile game for all intents and purposes. The EU needs to wake the fuck up and get with this century, be worrying about everything going through the NSA...oops, meant Google's servers, and Apple building nice little black boxes you have to fricking jailbreak just to install non approved software on. IE? Its a fucking corpse, its dead, its rotting, the only place it has ANY real foothold is enterprise and that's because Firefox fucked the enterprise users with the numbers spinning and Google really isn't interested in them, not as much nummy data they can collect from behind the corporate firewall.

So can we PLEASE let go of the bullshit already? its like a sheep kicking an old toothless wolf while two young and healthy lions put on their bibs and go "yep, bad old wolf, baaad" while they snicker. Ballmer is a piss poor CEO, he couldn't do the three Es if Billy held his sweaty hand and walked him through it, his track record is a fucking joke, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, WinPhone, the RRoD, fragmenting BOTH IE and DirectX...he's a fucking trainwreck. Bitching about IE while everyone uses their damned smartphones and iPads to read this is not only shortsighted, its fucking RETARDED. Talk about missing the freight train coming right for you...sheesh. Why am i not surprised the EU regulators are 10 years behind the fucking times? Maybe they should go after Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursors while they are at it...morons.