Windows Browser Ballot: the Winners and the Losers 134
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."
That agrees with my figures (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Link A has more hits than link B (Score:4, Interesting)
....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:That agrees with my figures (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Interesting)
Extrapolation [xkcd.com]: because past performance perfectly predicts future growth.
It's funny, and does make a valid point about silly extrapolations. However, it's flawed in that an arbitrary point was chosen for the "0" husbands point- they could have chosen any time prior to the point of marriage with equal validity- 5 seconds, 1 day, 20 years, and would have got very different results for each.
;-)
In fact, I'm not sure anything meaningful can be extrapolated from a situation like that- you could get an infinitely steep line by choosing a point infinitely close to the point of marriage, but that's just as bad, showing the meaninglessness of acting like discrete events are continuous. (If you had more points, you could probably legitimately draw a line through them if they displayed that trend, but it's not the case here).
BTW, are you sure that this XKCD [xkcd.com] isn't more relevant to the subject at hand?
Where is this "ballot screen", anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious, where is this "ballot screen", anyway?
I'm from Germany. I just bought a laptop a month or two ago; it came with windows 7 preinstalled (naturally: try getting a laptop from a major manufacturer that doesn't come with windows preinstalled). Browser-wise, it had IE installed on it, and that was it.
I fired up IE precisely once, to download an alternative browser, and I've been using that instead ever since. But I sure as heck didn't get a "browser ballot" screen where I could choose my preferred browser, or even any sort of hint that there are alternatives in the first place.
Of course, *I* didn't need either, but if it had been my 68-year old aunt instead who only recently got her first computer ever, it wouldn't even have occurred to her that there might be other browsers. And if it had, chances are she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of firing up IE just for downloading an alternative and installing that (which would probably have exceeded her abilities, anyway). And isn't that the situation where the "ballot screen" is supposed to help?
So, where is it? I've never seen it. I've never heard of any seeing it, personally. It keeps getting mentioned on Slashdot on occasion, but that's the only place I've encountered it.
Where is it?
Re:Got to love lousy statisticians (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
So, when will MacOS have a browser ballot?? (Score:2, Interesting)
So I'm still waiting for the EU to require Apple to have a browser ballot upon Mac OS first boot.... I won't hold my breath though.