The Seven Hidden Browsers In the Windows Ballot 246
Barence writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft started rolling out a Windows update within the European Union, giving every Internet Explorer user the option to switch browsers. As well as the five big names, anyone who scrolls the ballot window to the right will find seven further browsers, none of which is exactly a household name. There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area. But what are these unknown browsers actually like? To find out, seven PC Pro staff installed a browser each, used it exclusively for a day, and ran a variety of tests. The browser-by-browser verdict on the hidden seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Funny)
It's in the repositories [debian.org], like everything else.
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Hey wait! I just noticed that the name is a pun. It only took 8 years..
Ho ho ho.
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Where's the "-1, Whoosh" mod for Parent and all the sibling posts who didn't get it?
In other news The Gimp is so named because it's pure punishment using it.
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, look at Mr. Fancy-pants with his text all neatly positioned on the screen for him!
Real men use Wget or Curl. Bonus points for doing it all with netcat.
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Funny)
You kids with your fancy computers. In my days we used to serve web pages to each other with letters and postal mail!
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That's nothing! In my day we had to listen to the town crier describe web pages to us!
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Caves? You had caves, with walls? In my days we had to paint web pages with human blood on human skin...
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
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>>>Real men use Wget or Curl.
Bah. Humbug! Bullsh*t. 64K ought to be enough for anybody surfing the web:
Bootup - http://www.b-sting.nl/commodore64/ [b-sting.nl]
HyperLink 64 - http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html [armory.com]
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>>>Hey! Where's Lynx?
I've tried Lynx multiple times, but always end-up returning to "Links". I think it's more user-friendly and easier to read the sites (like slashdot).
The thing I like about these browsers is that you can have them open at work, and to your boss they look like esoteric programming Terminal windows rather than browsers. i.e. He thinks you're working. ;-)
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I tend to stick with ELinks, since it has tabbed browsing support. Links Hacked [sai.msu.ru] was pretty good back when it was maintained.
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I use w3m [sourceforge.net] myself.
Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:5, Insightful)
Avant browser is nothing more than a front-end for IE.
It's basically a window surrounding an embedded Internet Explorer object.
I personally think its ridiculous that MS offers it as an 'alternative browser'
Y
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it's up to MS. They just include the browsers the EU tells them to. The EU supposedly base the lists on "market share" though I haven't seen any reference as to exactly what they mean by that.
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Here's the usage share in Europe from one year ago (Q1 2009). I'm trying to find more recent data:
IE 67.7%
FF 25.3%
Safari 2.6%
Opera 1.4%
Chrome 1.0%
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Where did you find that information and do you have any info on the methodology used to obtain it?
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Ooops. Forgot to include the link. Sorry about that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#ADTECH_.28Europe.2C_2004_to_Q1_2009.29 [wikipedia.org]
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The EU supposedly base the lists on "market share" though I haven't seen any reference as to exactly what they mean by that.
It runs on Win 7. It shows a pulse. However faint.
In the long run, I suspect most users will go with what looks like the best fit for their Microsoft Windows OS, which will be iE8 and its successors.
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:5, Funny)
Not to worry, we still have plenty of real facts upon which to base our hatred of MS.
Oh, I forgot, none of those count when you're whining about people bashing poor little unloved MS.
We're just whoring for karma, yeah, that's it.
I don't need /. karma to hate, hate, HATE MS. Trying to use COM objects from Java is enough.
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Hey! Stop interrupting our regularly scheduled M$ hate with your truth!
It's hardly hate to claim "I personally think its ridiculous that MS offers it as an 'alternative browser'".
I'd suggest you try to get out of the M$ reality distortion field and listen to more objective points of view.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:5, Informative)
Maxthon, GreenBrowser and SlimBrowser are IE Front ends also. It means that 4 of the 7 (with Avant) are just IE Shells. One that is an IE/Gecko shell (Sleipnir). One that is essentially a FireFox offshoot (Flock) and K-Meleon.
Not that I have anything against Maxthon. Back when I was an IE user, it was my stepping stone to FireFox (though I didn't realize it at the time). I used it instead of IE6, the most current version of IE at the time, and was impressed by the tabbed browsing, pop-up/ad blocking and other "cool new" features while not having to completely abandon my IE-comfort-zone. Of course, I grew accustomed to having these features so going on a plain-IE PC turned into a chore. Then, one day, I decided to give FireFox a chance. It was a bit of an adjustment, but not as bad as I thought it would be. So while I wouldn't install Maxthon now, I do appreciate how it helped me transition from IE6 to FireFox.
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It's a perfectly valid option. I used Avant for years because at the time IE did the best job of rendering the most websites, but I wanted advanced features that IE didn't provide (tabbed browsing, saved sessions, etc).
Today I use Firefox, but if someone prefers Avant, why not use it? So what if it's just a wrapper for IE. It's still a valid option, and if you're going to provide a comprehensive list of browser options, it should be included.
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:4, Informative)
To be the devil's advocate, there are lots of browsers that share rendering engines, but that doesn't mean they don't count. Also on that list are Safari and Chrome (both using WebKit) as well as Firefox, K-meleon and Flock (all using Gecko.)
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's the first I've heard that. Where did you read that the EU government is enforcing which of the 12 browsers should be presented?
I'm surprised that Mozilla's SeaMonkey is not in there.
Or Netscape 9. I've never heard of those other browsers (except Meleon).
RTFA (Score:3)
From TFA:
"The agreement hammered out between Microsoft and the EC simply stipulated the “12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7” based on usage share in the European Economic Area"
Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE (Score:4, Informative)
I re-read the summary. I don't see any place where the EU Government *mandates* MS display the top 12 most-popular browsers. My reading of the summary doesn't tell us who made that decision, and I initially assumed it was Microsoft itself.
So I googled it: "The EU said Tuesday that European users will be asked to choose in a Web browser bake-off among 12 free Web browsers." - http://www.crn.com/software/223101178 [crn.com]
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It's a sad, sad day when a summary doesn't have all the details about something. Sad, sad day.
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You aren't following the thread of this conversation:
POSTER 1 - EU mandated that they be listed by market share.
POSTER 2 - Where?
POSTER 1 - It's in the summary.
POSTER 2 - No it isn't. Where did you read the EU mandated that?
POSTER 2 - (silence)
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http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/decisions/39530/final_decision_en.pdf [europa.eu]
6.3.82.a-d
Next time, do your own research.
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QUOTE from the settlement: "The five main web browsers with the highest usage share, ordered alphabetically [later changed to randomized] according to the vendor's company name, would be prominently displayed, and seven additional web browsers, also ordered alphabetically according to the vendor's company name, would be displayed if the user scrolls sideways." - http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/decisions/39530/final_decision_en.pdf [europa.eu]
- The top 5 are the most popular.
- The remaining 7 are apparen
IE engine with a new GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of these are the IE rendering engine wrapped in a new user interface. They appeared in the days when IE development was dead and provided useful things like tabs and popup blocking, while staying compatible with the IE6-only websites that used to be everywhere.
Maxthon for one is very popular in China because it supports ActiveX which many Chinese banking websites rely on (bleh), and it is much nicer to use than IE6. I am not sure how it compares to IE8 though.
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Actually the summary is awful - of the 7 lesser known browsers - Avant, Maxthon, Slepnir are using trident (MSHTML). Appreciate that they may well be individual legitimate projects and not meaning to cast any aspersions on them, but having an additional 3 options which are how MS renders the web and whatever fobiles that entails
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You're wrong, though. (for two reasons, one being less important the other) The main thing is that while yes, Safari and Chrome both use WebKit, their implementations can actually be different. Any changes should head upstream, but Chrome can use a newer release of WebKit than the latest version of Safari, for example. (Same with Gecko implementations.) And of course, don't forget things like extensions and whatnot. But, anything implementing Trident can only use Trident and change the window chrome because
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They don't really use the same rendering engine, though. WebKit has had dozens of changes not yet included in KHTML, though at some point Konqueror will move to using Qt's built-in WebKit widget soon enough.
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What makes you think they were counted as the same browser?
Last time I checked, Konquerer was not exactly a widely used browser (and here comes the important part) that runs on Win
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Appreciate that they may well be individual legitimate projects and not meaning to cast any aspersions on them, but having an additional 3 options which are how MS renders the web and whatever fobiles that entails, just seems wrong.
Then blame the EU. They are only included due to their list of the top 12 browsers.
Re:IE engine with a new GUI (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, there are currently only 4 rendering engines worth talking about, I believe their used to be five(I think that Konqueror used to have it's own rendering engine though I was never a KDE man, so I may be wrong) so looking at a list of 12 you're going to see a fair amount of overlap. Add in the fact that to the best of my knowledge only Opera uses Presto and the overlap becomes even more extreme.
IE has caused me huge amounts of dramas and still continues to do so, it is probably the one thing I will never forgive Microsoft for, but what else would you have put in the other 7 slots(8 if you want to make sure that a rendering engine is only represented once). Once you've put in the big 5 and a few of the moderately tolerable gecko ports what have you got left. Especially since they have to run on Windows. I suppose one of those slots could have gone to seamonkey, but as a browser it's identical to firefox so there's not much point. I don't know who decided that the number had to be 12, but with that large a number you're really bound to have some pretty awful stuff in there. Rendering engines are complex beasts, which is why there are really only 4 of them. Javascript engines are even more complex which is why there are only 4 of them(I know that Safari and Chrome have different Javascript engines even though they have the same rendering engine and I'm counting those, but IE's is so godawful it doesn't count). It takes a large team of programmers years to come up with something halfway decent, and that requires serious amounts of money or trying to snag open source developers when most of the people with the right skill set are already likely to be working on Gecko or Webkit.
Re:IE engine with a new GUI (Score:4, Informative)
That would be KHTML [wikipedia.org]...which is what Apple forked to create WebKit
Re:IE engine with a new GUI (Score:4, Informative)
Konqueror still uses KHTML by default, and it is still in active development (and it has pulled some stuff back in from Webkit), although there is increasing momentum for switching the default to the Webkit Kpart (built on the Webkit that is now part of QT).
>I suppose one of those slots could have gone to seamonkey, but as a browser it's identical to firefox so there's not much point.
No, the SeaMonkey browser is not "identical to Firefox". SeaMonkey has a sidebar and a <link> bar built-in, the URL bar and search bar are one and the same, they haven't combined the reload and stop buttons, and there are more options without going to about:config (and the options are better laid out). Until about FF3, it was more stable too, but FF finally caught up.
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That shell game (pun intended) started back in the IE3 or IE4 days.
This won't make the user happier (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This won't make the user happier (Score:5, Insightful)
if you actually got confused by this 'invasive dialogue' then you have no business helping anyone with any computer, and might want to think about wearing a helmet on a regular basis.
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...might want to think about wearing a helmet on a regular basis.
What kind of conclusion do you think they would come to?
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Which is why they're having the 5 most popular browsers initially visible, and the other 7 so that you have to scroll over to see them.
QC (Score:5, Insightful)
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SeaMonkey? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SeaMonkey? (Score:4, Funny)
"Hey Sea Monkeys! It's time for the 'I Hate Marco' Show!" ::high-pitched female choir:: "IIIII Hate Marco! Hate Marco! Hate Marco and his mailbox head!"
Re:SeaMonkey? (Score:4, Funny)
"Hey Sparkplug, did you see the ratings? Number eight, baby!"
Re:SeaMonkey? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except a few of the browser in the '7 list' use IE's rendering engine.
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So out of the 12 browsers offered, 6 of them, that's half, are based on the Trident engine.
Yes, but only 1 of the top 5 browsers, and the ones below that barely register in the market. Which goes to show you: the only reason any significant number of people will use a browser with the IE engine is because it came with their computer.
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I couldn't live without Seamonkey, but for the group of users who will be using the browser ballot, Firefox is probably a better fit for them; including Seamonkey would just be needless duplication.
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>>>Seamonkey would just be needless duplication
That was my initial thought, but then I realized that most of the bottom 7 browsers are actually Internet Explorer clones, so that too is needless duplication. If there will be duplication of the IE suite, why not have duplication of the Mozilla suite too?
Besides seaMonkey is a nice small footprint service - smaller than Firefox and provides additional services like Email, Chat, and Usenet newsgroups. I think it's worth listing.
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I use SeaMonkey on my Puppy Linux install. Why? Because it has a smaller memory footprint that allows it to fit inside RAM without needing virtual mem thrashing (HDD). So YES some people would rather use SeaMonkey than Firefox, and it really should be listed as an option rather than left off. I'm surprised no one from that team complained.
At least they included Opera. It's a good browser - the only flaw is the constant need to "mask as firefox" or "mask as explorer" since many websites refuse to talk t
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Re:SeaMonkey? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to the answer [google.com] given by Robert Kaiser - who I believe is probably the same Robert Kaiser that is the Seamonkey project coordinator.
Quoted in full:
"I repeatedly get questions why SeaMonkey is not on the browser ballot, and of course I keep telling those people that only one browser per vendor is allowed and Firefox and SeaMonkey are regarded to be from the same vendor, Mozilla."
There you go.
Missed the point (Score:4, Interesting)
So what? This is about remedying anti-competitive practices. "Our product is better than theirs so they should be locked out of the market" is not a valid defense to an anti-trust lawsuit.
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Except in this case, "locked out of the market" == "not promoted by the competition."
Testing? (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA:
we installed each browser on the same Windows 7 computer and tested their speed in the SunSpider benchmark, their memory usage with the Google home page open in a single tab, and their startup times – measured from the moment we clicked the icon to the browser window appearing.
Expectation for any sort of consistency in the testing parameters has been set to zero. But, at least we get to see which browsers are most-liked and offer a nice user experience, right?
Then we asked seven members of the PC Pro team to abandon their favoured browser and switch to one of these alternatives. To say they were delighted to do so would be a lie: there was gnashing of teeth, wailing and screaming pleas for mercy. All these fell on deaf ears. We provide full reviews of each browser in the Reviews section, but for a helpful summary click through to the next page.
OK, expectation of any sort of positive review of any browser has been set to zero.
The only consolation is that the popularity of the top 12 browsers is re-examined every six months.
Which means PCPro will have a steady ad revenue from writing meaningless reviews cobbled from the barest minimum of testing where the browser used by the least whiny of the random-picked team gets top marks just because that person hates change the least.
In fact, maybe a PC Pro browser is exactly what the EU needs
If it's written with the same attention and care to detail as the articles, the first installed instance of it will crash the Internet and bring civilization to a smoking ruin.
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I guess I just need a couple more pieces of flair.
What manner of testing is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
They ran it through one Javascript test (SunSpider), so that’s at least something, I suppose.
Their other “benchmarks” are woefully lacking in the usefulness department. They gave the startup time (in seconds)... I’m much more interested in how quickly pages load. They gave the memory requirement at startup (with Google loaded as the homepage)... I’m much more interested in how much memory it’s consumed after a few hours of browsing.
Not to mention that certain browsers (*cough* IE) take way longer to give you a usable browser than they do to just display the window. That’s just the same trick of showing your desktop while Windows finishes loading; it looks like it accomplished something, but you still can’t click anything yet.
What it is actually (Score:3, Informative)
a desktop link to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ [browserchoice.eu]
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Actually it is C:\WINDOWS\system32\browserchoice.exe /launch which redirects to the above.
Outdated browsing (Score:2)
"the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."
One of them must be Internet Explorer. :)
Probably version 6. I know it's "dead" but like a JRPG boss, it will keep coming back until we kill the evil mastermind behind it.
Why would there be quality control? (Score:2)
MS is simply doing as told and it appears to be bending over backwards to comply with what the EU thinks everyone wants. How is it MS's job to help you choose another browser...they offer the option to pick a different one after that your own your own.
What I do not understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Is why they are going after Microsoft exclusively and why only browsers.
Every OS on the planet has a list of software they have bundled with them.
Their is nothing wrong with this, sure I do not like using pretty much everything MS bundles with windows, but I would not want to spend huge amounts of time configuring it during installation and still only be offered the top X of the market share.
Re:What I do not understand (Score:5, Informative)
That's the Point, Isn't It? (Score:3)
... the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like.
The "other five" are there to make IE8 look good by comparison as well as infer that all alternative browsers are inferior while making Microsoft look magnanimous and unafraid of competition.
Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:5, Insightful)
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And it's not like any of those top 5 browsers are much worse or better than another (ok IE aside for us nerds). Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari are all good browsers.
It seems Opera has increased it's market share most. It's probably the best choice too, since a casual user doesn't need to go finding all the different addons and other things he or she doesn't have any idea about. People seem to love it and stay with Opera. It's just that they didn't hear about it before, as Opera doesn't have such zealots
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Sure it is good at browsing the web, but as a program it sucks!
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Come up with one (single) instance of Google misusing customer data and I will henceforth refer to myself as a fool and stop using Google altogether. So will millions of others, I assume.
BTW, you know that Chrome's callback features can be disabled in the options menu, right? And if my memory serves, IE and Firefox also call home (less extensively).
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Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:4, Interesting)
For most its not a matter of if Google has played nice with their customer data so far, its the fact that they have all of it to start with. Some people are just uncomfortable with google having access to so much about them and see it as potentailly orwellian, if its not already.
Knows where you are.
Has access to your e-mail.
Has access to your medical records.
Stores your word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.
Facilitates chat, voice and video conversations, as well as text messages.
Tracks what you search for and view on the Web.
Keeps track of your upcoming appointments.
Knows your contacts.
Knows what you read.
Knows what you buy.
And of course the tin-foil hat types will argue, how will we know if they are abusing it, they are in charge of the search engines most use to find out and we know they have no problems with censorship.
As for me I could care less at the moment, nothing to hide...but its still an encroachment on freedom and privacy, its not that hard to understand why some are concerned.
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Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera doesn't have such zealots as Firefox yelling all around how good their browser supposedly is
You’re kidding, right?
Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:5, Funny)
You're kidding, right?
Give us credit for getting quieter when the claims that FireFox invented everything good about web browsing died down.
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*Whoosh* to you too.
Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:5, Funny)
You’re kidding, right?
Of course he is. Everyone knows that Opera was the first web browser to have zealots - Firefox totally ripped that off.
Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but Firefox totally did it better.
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I have had Opera for a long time and the thng is I just can not get comfortable with it.
I have been trying to move to Chrome for the extra speed and now that it has plugins I can get it working the way I want it to.
Truth is that I just can not kick the Firefox habit. I have the plugins I want and I don't have crash issues with it so it is in the Just works category.
The best plugin as far as making your browsing more stable? PDF download. Acrobat reader used to crash my system all the time.
PDF download combi
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Although I still prefer Firefox, IE8 is actually more or less tolerable.
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Are you kidding? Merits of the browser aside, Opera has got to have the highest zealot-to-user ratio out of any mainstream web browser.
Seems like I hear about Opera all the time, but don't (actually) know a single person who uses it daily. I've used it a few times, and could never get over the weird UI... (it sure is fast though)
Re:And thus the folly is proven (Score:4, Interesting)
That’s weird... it specifically said that users who already didn’t use IE as their default browser weren’t supposed to see the choices screen.
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I'm not sure why the parent is modded Flamebait.
It is true - these other browsers (and I use that term loosely - some of these are just wrappers around the IE engine) may be interesting to nerds and geeks for a variety of reasons but they offer minimal value to the average user.
It is nice for them to have exposure, but why expose users to bad software? I have tried some of these other browsers myself, specifically Sleipnir, Maxthon, and Avant. Saying that they're "not as good" is an understatement. They hav
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I think it's even worse that I recognized what you were referring to when only seeing
Internet Explorer LOSES 10 CHARM!
Internet Explorer IS NOW KNOWN AS GreenBrowser.
before seeing Legend of the Red Dragon.
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now if Mozilla threw millions of quid at TV advertising...
It would be messy and constitute animal cruelty.
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Sorry for my typo at the end. I meant IE not IR.
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Clearly you haven't been following this topic for very long. The top 5 browsers are always on the first screen; though the order is randomized. (Though they didn't do it very well as you can read here: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser-ballot.html [robweir.com])
Essentially they have a list of highly popular browsers and a list of other browsers some people seem to use. They shuffle both lists then put the list of popular browsers first followed by the other list.
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This is a very clever strategy to purposely have a large number of mostly crap alternatives, just to bury Chrome and Firefox.
It's not, because Chrome and Firefox are always in the first 5 slots (which are visible by default). For all those other browsers, you have to scroll right (and for that you first have to even notice the scrollbar!).
Microsoft are very clever to turn even this browser selector into something that is more not less likely to establish the incorrect opinion that IE is best overall and then have users who tried something else switch back to IR.
Microsoft does not decide which browsers go on the selector. It's the list of top 12 browsers by usage in EU, as determined by EU bureaucrats.