Microsoft Tweaks Browser Ballot As EU Deal Nears 187
CWmike writes "Microsoft has revamped the browser ballot screen demanded by European Union antitrust regulators and may get final approval as early as Dec. 15, a source familiar with the case has told Computerworld. As first reported by Bloomberg, Microsoft modified the ballot screen after rivals, including Opera Software and Mozilla, demanded changes. Last month, Opera, Mozilla and Google submitted change requests to the European Commission, asking that the order of the browsers be randomized and that the ballot be displayed in its own application, not in Internet Explorer. According to the source, who asked not to be identified because the terms of the settlement have not been officially approved, the top five browsers — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari — will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed."
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:3, Insightful)
This entire idiotic situation is arising because Opera is upset that most people don't like their browser.
It would be rather ironic if this additional exposure to unsuspecting users backfires as people start sharing "avoid the Opera option in the ballot, it's bad", and that creates an overall bad image causing Opera's market share to plunge additionally.
I am an occasional Opera user (and well of all browsers, as a web dev), and appreciate its strengths, but its UI and features have a number of specifics compared to other browsers, not the least of which is a single-click file sharing server. For this type of functiona we know is a security nightmare in the hands of the average user (or unsuspectingly, their children).
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
How would you display them otherwise?
By number of units sold - IE would be first as it comes with all operating systems, and they're all free now
By the letter of the alphabet - Is it "Microsoft Internet Explorer" or "Internet Explorer", "Firefox" or "Mozilla Firefox", how soon do you think a browser called "aaaaBrowser" will appear just to appear the first
By popularity or market share - based on who's stats... it's well known the expression here "Netcraft confirms it"
Random really does seem the best for now, and as long as these 5 browsers are not hardcoded... though it would be interesting if Microsoft would launch "Microsoft SilverlightBrowser" or something in Windows 2010 or something like that and as it's sold with the OS there will probably be two MS browsers in first 5
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is just stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
That it is free to the end user does not mean that they do not make more money the more the browser is installed. For example, Google pays to be the default search engine in Firefox. I doubt they paid a total fixed sum, but rather an amount based on aggregate downloads/installs.
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:1, Insightful)
So if people really don't know what a browser is, and they really don't, what does it matter if they pick a random one? And why _not_ provide more choices than the top 5? Linux provides a few firefox clones, swiftweasel, iceweasel, no big deal... Right now, the windows user that knows nothing about browsers, has this choice made for him by microsoft. Besides the illegal tying thing, is that really a better way to go? I think not..
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:2, Insightful)
Err, no, they are hoping to gain some market share of confused windows users. A demographic that now goes nearly 100% to IE, profitting MicroSoft, the authors of confusion.
Re:This is just stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is just stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Because of things like your list.
Microsoft hard-coded things like your "three options labeled 1, 2, and C" in Internet Explorer so that it took ten years for the web to get users to realize why other browsers were needed.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely none of these are anywhere near as central to the average user's computer usage as the web browser is. And regardless, there's no problem with those anyway as Microsoft only packages minimally functional implementations of those programs with Windows which don't offer any real competition to more serious products in the same categories.
Furthermore, the quality or lack thereof of those bundled programs doesn't really affect much. So what if MS Paint doesn't have fancy filters? So what if Notepad doesn't have multiple kill buffers and advanced scripting capability? So what if Explorer doesn't have multiple panes? However, Internet Explorer's dominant position offers Microsoft significant influence over the development of the web, and held it back massively until Firefox started eating into its market share, and still does to a significant extent.
You can bug the EU to make Microsoft include your browser in the ballot when far more people than just you use it. In case you didn't notice before jumping to the comment box to write your whiny rant, they're not putting every random asshat's pet project in there. They're only including the top browsers.
Breaking fucking news, the rules are different for monopolies, especially for abusive monopolies.
Re:This is just stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm reminded of the time when IE was in its infancy and it had trouble downloading Netscape Navigator. FTP worked fine, Mosaic worked fine, and NN could download itself - but IE often stalled at ~98%. Not saying that was a deliberate act on the part of MS, but an odd co-incidence, no?
Besides, if the threshold for a computer licence was "figuring out how to download and install Application X", the world would still be be using typewriters, doing budgets in ledgers and cashbooks by hand &/or calculator, listening to music on the radio or stereo system, and surreptitiously buying Playboy at the local corner store...
Because they haven't been accused, charged and convicted of leveraging their effective OS monopoly in an attempt to ensure Notepad, Paintbrush, etc are the de facto text / graphics / etc program, nor have they been accused, charged, and nearly convicted of deliberately stalling to delay following up on their legally-mandated penalties and obligations in relation to the original conviction?
(Oh, and it usually goes "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" - I don't think you get to choose to mix and match ;-)
Re:A nightmare for tech support (Score:2, Insightful)
The randomization is bad for one big reason. Since they will never be in the same order, when family calls for help I can't just tell them to click on the middle one
Oh come on now. I'm sure your family may not be tech wizards, but it's taking it a bit too far to say they can not discern distinct objects based on a simple description. How did they learn to read? I'm pretty sure that "click the blue E, red O, planet with fox, compass icon, four-color beach ball" would be enough of a guide for any person who have enough intelligence for basic daily tasks to select the right one.
The question is, would everyone have someone on the phone giving advice during setup? Not always.
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:2, Insightful)
I make a competing calculator app. I want mine included in Windows. I feel like my calculator app has more features, greater standards support, and provides more functions.
I also make a competing notepad, sticky note, media player, web browser, desktop shell, icon set, sound theme, etc.
There should be twenty ballots before the user can start Windows. Clearly, Windows has hurt my marketshare in numerous areas. I should be subsidized by the government and people should have to pick between five different calculators, five different shells, five different notepads, etc. It's only fair.
P.S.: I also make a separate kernel, and I think it's unfair that Windows users are forced to use the NT kernel, not to mention the userland.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
There go my mod points...
We could breath new life into the text editor market, casual picture editing market, file compression market, file browser market, music player market, etc.
Do you understand why IE is a problem?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade. After dropping support for other platforms, it effectively meant that many web pages were Windows-only. This was sometimes through no fault of their own, simply because they tested it with IE and assumed that worked. Sometimes it was deliberate -- why waste time supporting less than 5% of the population, when 95% can view your page?
Only when Firefox started seriously threatening its marketshare did IE start to improve, and it has done so incredibly slowly, compared to any of its rivals.
Yet even now, the damage has been done. To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
To compound this problem, you do kind of need a web browser to download another web browser. So even if I wanted to make a conscious choice to use, say, Firefox, I'd have to visit the Firefox download page from IE. It isn't as though Microsoft can reasonably be expected to ship an OS without a browser, unless we leave it up to the manufacturers, as most users would not know how to use ftp at the commandline to get Firefox.
So this is a sane solution to a real problem.
Compare this to your other examples. It isn't as though Notepad royally screws up text -- recent versions probably even handle Unicode properly, and even if we all adopt the defacto Microsoft standard of CRLF, it's not hurting anything -- nor is there a significant monopoly problem with text editors. And if notepad isn't there, you can download something else.
Same with casual picture editing. Download Paint.net or Gimp, and even if you don't, it's not as though there's some scandal with the png and jpeg file formats that makes them a nightmare to work with because some asshat breaks the standard every chance they get.
File compression? Standards work, there isn't a monopoly problem, and you don't need a file compression utility to download a file compression utility.
And so on.
Where do I sign up to have the VB 3 based browser I wrote in 8th grade added?... GIMP/MyFirstPictureEditor
What's the marketshare of your browser? How well does it support standards? Where's the indication that it's a legitimate choice?
Is there any indication that Gimp is a monopoly of anything, or that it's abused that monopoly power?
randomly populate lopsided projects like Gnome/KDE... MySQL/Postgres, vi/emacs
Because that's so lopsided right now. Also, what standards has Gnome created that KDE breaks? They seem to cooperate pretty well. MySQL and PostgreSQL seem to both support standard SQL, and vi/emacs seem to both support Unicode well enough.
Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris/Hurd
This is the only analogy that comes close to making sense -- yet all of these seem to support POSIX and X11 decently well.
On a serious note, when has choice in Linux ever been randomized?
When has any needed to be? Come to think of it, when has Linux, or anything currently running on Linux, ever abused monopoly power, or had a monopoly of anything to abuse?
On a serious note, I actually think it would be a bit easier to simply force Windows to ship without a browser, and let the OEMs sort it out, but I don't have much of a problem with the "random ballot" -- other than that it's going to lead to the best marketing winning, not the best software.
Happy (Score:3, Insightful)
The object of this ballot system is to let users know that a choice even exists. It's not to promote any specific competitor. You seem to overlook the fact that there are people out there (and quite a few, I might add) that don't know they have a choice. They don't know what a browser is. They just know they click that specific icon to get on the internet. They don't know there is an internet separate from the web. A lot of computer users have very limited knowledge.
As to why they should know, that is everything to do with economics. You can go read about that in depth, but the gist of it is that information is the lifeblood of a market (particularly an information market). The more nuanced an understanding the average participant has of the marketplace, the healthier that market will be. This is because as sophistication grows in the market, the options must become refined to compete. To put that in terms of browsers, as more browsers compete they all become standards-compliant and have to differentiate on other factors such as speed, security, extensions, portability (both the browser and the data), and so on.
Re:We know what this is really about (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't everything Microsoft includes in their OS damaging to competing markets?
I mean, and this isn't even hypothetical, if no Notepad came with Windows, there'd be many, dozens of alternatives with marginally more features. This was the case even when Windows just came out, that applications with hardly more features were on the market. I don't know about the state of calculators, but certainly Notepad and Wordpad killed an entire marketplace.
If Microsoft in a future version of Windows adds an Expose like functionality, or a virtual desktop functionality (like Mac's "Spaces", or Linux' typically built in virtual desktop functionality) will they be abusing their monopoly? Why? Both of their two largest competitors have those feature built in. What about search? Including decent search in Vista, and even better search in Windows 7 killed at least a handful of worse search engines. Heck, even Google Desktop was pretty significantly hurt by the release of Vista, as poor as the reception was. Windows 7 improves on the indexing and search, and goes further and adds search federation. Is that abusing their monopoly?
This is the problem. Microsoft produces an operating system and desktop environment. What people EXPECT in other operating systems and desktop environments far exceeds what the average Slashdotter would admit should be legal for Microsoft to include. When I run Mac OS X, I expect a lot, ditto with Linux. Yet, for Microsoft to even come close to feature parity would be many, many lawsuits waiting to happen.
Re:Consumer friendly? (Score:2, Insightful)
If browser selection screens are consumer friendly why doesn't Chrome OS have one?
Because Google has not been convicted of illegally using Chrome OS's monopoly market share to dominate the browser market. For that to even be possible, Chrome OS would first have to achieve a monopoly.
There's too many people in this discussion acting surprised that Microsoft is being held to a different standard. Yes, Microsoft IS being treated differently here. It's not because a bunch of Windows-haters are running the EU. It's because they are a convicted monopolist. They have already caused problems and broken laws, and now being forced to do things that Google is not being forced to do is part of their punishment. There's nothing unfair about this. Microsoft is not on equal ground compared to other companies that are not convicted monopolists. Please stop acting shocked that there are two different standards in effect.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Try not to get too angry. There are so many people on here who don't have the ability to run a google search to see why MS are so unpopular and just blindly believe it's because the ungrateful Yooroes who would all be speaking Kraut if it wasn't for Uncle Sam are punishing a successful US corp for being successful.
Re:Hypocrites. (Score:5, Insightful)
The choice has always been there, albeit more complicated to make. The issue has been that Microsoft has promoted their browser through their operating system monopoly, leading to unfair competition, not that people haven't been given a choice per se.
I personally don't think it is a big issue whether the ballot should be random or not. It sounds more like they are quibbling about details. But if the goal is to remove the leverage MS has through controlling the operating system, I'd say a random ballot ought to be more "fair" than letting MS pick the order. Sure, those who don't care will get a random browser, but why should MS be given the advantage of getting (more of) those users?