BrowserChoice.eu was a website created by Microsoft in March 2010 in the wake of the European Union Microsoft antitrust case decision. The case involved legal proceedings by the European Union against the company and found that by including Internet Explorer with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used this dominance to create a similar market position in the web browser market. This website was created to allow users who had either not made or were unaware of a choice to try other websites.

Microsoft's legal obligation to display the Browser Choice screen to Windows users expired in December 2014.^[1] The website was discontinued as early as the next year, showing a notice advising users to visit the websites of the browser vendors directly. It has since gone completely offline.^[2]

Web browser choice screen

The choice screen, also known as the ballot box, was displayed in Internet Explorer, which offered ten to twelve browsers in random order.^[3] The screen was only presented to Windows users whose default web browser was Internet Explorer. It affected the European Economic Area,^[4] Croatia, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.^[5] A patch was made available via Windows Update to provide the screen to users,^[6] and was distributed under the Microsoft Knowledge Base ID number 976002; after the website was discontinued in December 2014, the update was removed from Microsoft Update Catalog.

Browsers listed

The browser choice screen listed ten to twelve browsers in random order, with the top tier of five immediately visible and the remaining ones being seen by scrolling the list.

The first group included the five most used browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and initially Safari but later Maxthon - representing the four major rendering engines (Trident, Gecko, Blink, WebKit). The second group contained browsers that were not as well-known, also in random order: at different times, this group included but was not limited to Avant Browser, Comodo Dragon, Flock, Maxthon, and SlimBrowser.

Results

Competing browsers saw their traffic increase,^[7] suggesting that these smaller competing developers were gaining users. However, long-term trends indicate that browsers such as Opera and Firefox are losing market share in Europe, raising questions about the effectiveness of the browser choice screen.^[1]

Criticism

The order of the browsers on the screen was initially insufficiently random, resulting in an uneven distribution.^[8][9] This was later fixed by Microsoft.^[10]

At the time of its inception, half of the suggested browsers used Internet Explorer's Trident rendering engine, thus users who choose web browsers other than Internet Explorer for the intention of avoiding it might still end up using IE's layout engine. This had resulted in criticism among the web development community, even though Microsoft was adhering to the court agreement's methodology.^[11]

Opera Software complained that the ballot screen could not be reached in some cases because of the start configuration screens of IE.^[12] In 2012, Microsoft had issues with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 no longer leading new users in the European Union to the page. The Windows 7 SP1 retail release was initially missing BrowserChoice.eu functionality, affecting 28 million computers. The error remained unpatched for 14 months, and as a result, in March 2013, the European Commission fined Microsoft €561 million.^[13] Windows 8 was also released without the browser choice screen functionality and patched several days after the release. Mozilla's general counsel estimated that 6–9 million downloads of the Firefox web browser alone were lost due to the mistake.^[14][15]

See also

• United States v. Microsoft
• Criticism of Microsoft
• European Union Microsoft antitrust case

References

External links

• browserchoice.eu on the Internet Archive (archived 2014-02-20)
• BrowserChoice.eu at Wikipedia