Microsoft Giving Rival Browsers a Lift 272
gollum123 tips an article at the NY Times on the progress of the European Windows browser choice screen that we have been discussing recently. "Rivals of Microsoft's market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch. Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is the strongest competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer worldwide, said that more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox via a 'choice screen' that has been popping up on Windows-equipped computers in Europe since the end of last month. ... Opera Software, based in Oslo, said downloads of its browser in Belgium, France, Britain, Poland, and Spain had tripled since the screen began to appear. Microsoft said it was too early to tell whether the choice screen might prompt significant numbers of users to change. The digital ballot is being delivered over the Internet with software updates, and it is expected to take until mid-May to complete the process. The browser choice will also be presented to buyers of new Windows computers across the European Union for five years."
Re:Opera with or without ads? (Score:5, Informative)
September 20, 2005
Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser.
BTW (Score:5, Informative)
The script on that page uses a proper shuffle algorithm now (Fisher-Yates/Durstenfeld). If the page is viewed without Javascript, the order is fixed though, with IE being in the leftmost spot...
Re:Opera with or without ads? (Score:1, Informative)
Opera is not ad supported anymore. It does seem to render some pages wrong though. From my understanding it is the pages fault and not Operas.
Re:Opera download numbers (Score:3, Informative)
Presumably they can track where the users come from via referer HTTP header.
Re:Opera download numbers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Overreach. (Score:4, Informative)
I am aware Microsoft has been a little overreaching with their software practices in the past
Congratulations, sir, for winning the understatement of the day award.
They barely got off in 1991, thanks to a deadlocked panel. They settled with the DOJ in 1994 to end their investigation into abusive monopoly practices, and then they breached that settlement, prompting the trial in 1998 involving 20+ states and the US Department of Justice.
In that trial, witnesses intentionally failed to answer questions, claimed not to recall, and provided answers directly contrary to the documentary evidence. Microsoft submitted falsified video evidence and edited demonstrations regarding the operation of its software and the process involved in switching to that of competitors.
They were convicted of abusive practices, a finding not overturned on appeal.
Similar EU proceedings produced the ballot screen, also a minor slap on the wrist.
What if I started a class action suit against Apple because Itunes is installed by default, and that is a "monopoly" on digital music storefronts?
It's not. It's a dominant player, but it's not a monopoly, and even if it were, it has not engaged in unlawful leveraging of that power.
Microsoft's IE trouble isn't because it's included with Windows--it's because they launched IE as a separate product and then violated their DOJ agreement when they started integrating into Windows. It took seven years of legal action to get them to un-integrate it.
Had they complied with their original obligations and kept the products separate while allowing OEMs to bundle other browsers without being penalized, they wouldn't be in this situation and no one would care that MSIE is the default browser on MS Windows.
Yes they are the main provider of consumer level OS's to the big-box retailers. So let them package and run by default the software of their choosing. People don't have to buy M$
Contradiction of points. The difficulty of avoiding Microsoft and their misconduct in prior settlements is the major reason they face this penalty.
This would be like forcing a leading car manufacturer to offer brakes from 3rd party companies, because the buyers are complacent enough to accept their shitty factory brakes, but litigation hungry enough to file complaints about them.
Ah, the inept car analogy. Now I know I'm just feeding the trolls.
1. No leading car manufacturer uses first-party brakes.
2. Brakes are an integral component of a car; IE was a separate product that Microsoft decided to weave into Windows specifically to quash competing products, using their captive monopoly audience (both OEMs and customers) to do so.
3. MS is not being punished for its selection of a shitty browser, but for its repeated breach of legally-binding settlements requiring that they not bundle any additional products with Windows. Trying to tie the IE codebase into the OS was an attempt to dodge that bullet by calling IE a "feature" and not a product.
4. Unless that car company was using its cars in order to squeeze out other brake manufacturers, and made it such that installing third party brakes meant adding an extension onto the axles, with the MS brakes still mounted to the wheel, and then forcing all of its dealers and licensed maintenance shops to use MS brakes and not offer any others for aftermarket installation, it would not be engaging in similar conduct.
5. Even if the car company did engage in that conduct, if it complied with the original penalty (no mandatory bundling), it would still more than likely be permitted to install its brakes as the default choice.
Re:Some things, you need to 'force'. (Score:3, Informative)
Well you could argue about food safety standards too...
But no, I don't see how this crap is necessary at all, and I'm saying this as a long time Opera user.
Either the clueless people will be clicking randomly, which won't result in any improvements since they'll just stick to whatever they picked initially, or the were already familiar with that browser and would have downloaded it anyway. Then there's the fact that the top five vendors felt it's cool to keep everybody else out of the view, nicely hidden by some horizontal scrolling and not in the same shuffling pool as the top five. Yeah, that's fair.
Re:BTW (Score:3, Informative)
Windows script host is an integral part of the windows operating system. Most scripted automation tasks rely on it in Windows.
WSH, by default supports both JScript and VBScript.
Re:informed decisions? (Score:5, Informative)
This leads me to ask who wrote the descriptions of the various browsers.
It's something that is trivial to find out on your own. Here [browserchoice.eu] is the ballot page. If you click on "Tell me more" buttons, you'll see that all links lead to web pages hosted on a domain owned the company behind the browser (mozilla.com, apple.com, opera.com, google.com etc).
Sorry if that didn't provide any substance to yet another "evil MS" conspiracy theory...
Re:Opera with or without ads? (Score:3, Informative)
It does seem to render some pages wrong though. From my understanding it is the pages fault and not Operas.
Google in particular likes to write browser-specific web apps - "we support browser X, Y and Z" - where the list is usually "IE, Firefox, Chrome" these days. There used to be a time when they did browser detection in GMail, and show "this browser is not supported" for Opera. Lately the same goes for Buzz.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:informed decisions? (Score:3, Informative)
and also having no intention to use Windows 7 any time in the near future
The browser ballot is presented to Windows XP and Vista users as well (via auto-update).
Re:Ballot screen installed, where is it? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:informed decisions? (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now
The EU has certainly waited until far too late - this step should have been taken 10 years ago. However, I do support what they are doing simply because it will prevent history from repeating itself.
Sure they didn't support PNG format properly until way too late, but really what makes the web so much better now than it was when Netscape threw in the towel and decided to rewrite their browser from scratch? We had CSS back then.
Yes, we had more or less the same standards back then, the difference is that IE's support for them was criminally broken. Getting anything reasonably advanced to work the way you wanted it to on IE was *really* hard. Getting stuff to work on both IE and any other browser was even harder - this means that the web never really advanced much, and where it did it only ended up working on IE, which was a serious problem for those of us who didn't have Windows machines.
I think the real problem for the web over the last decade was the W3C. HTML kept improving while the browser manufacturers kept adding features and W3C adopted what they liked.
You *need* standards, otherwise you go back to a situation where the platforms have diverged and only the majority platform is supported. Back in the days where IE had the monopoly, all the other browsers were basically playing catch-up - not because they were technologically behind IE, but because it is really hard to support an ad-hoc "standard" that is barely documented and only implemented on one platform. I want the browser writers to spend their time implementing improvements to functionality, not tweaking existing functionality so that it matches the bugs in another browser.
The successor to HTML 4 was XHTML, which was technical fiddling around the edges rather than adding something for the end user. Eventually we are going to get HTML 5
HTML 5 is a terrible design. XHTML introduced some real improvements over HTML 4.01, but a small number of vendors (Microsoft, Nokia, etc.) decided to raise two fingers at the W3C and implement their own badly designed standard instead (HTML 5). A standard which completely throws away all those improvements and introduces a bunch of badly thought out elements which are going to require frequent redesigns of the language to support future technologies (XHTML was going down the genericised path whereby future technologies would frequently not require language changes, which is a far saner idea).
Sure, HTML 5 introduces some features that XHTML hadn't got around to implementing, but it would've been far more sensible and reasonably trivial to extend XHTML in a generic way in order to implement those features.