Just this morning, as I turned on my bedroom Windows 7 PC, I was greeted by the familiar “You’ve got updates!” notification. It turns out this was the much-talked about browser ballot – after installing, though, I couldn’t find the darn thing (probably because I uninstalled IE long ago). Anyway, to get to the point: we have more complaints. A few browser vendors are – once again – unsatisfied with the ballot’s design. On a related note, Opera is already claiming an increase in downloads.
The browser ballot was conceived by Microsoft and the European Commission, with input from the other browser makers, Opera, Mozilla, and Google (I’m not sure if Apple participated in any meaningful way). The remaining seven browsers currently on the ballot, AvantBrowser, Flock, K-Meleon, GreenBrowser, Maxthon, Sleipnir, and SlimBrowser, didn’t know they’d be on the ballot until only very recently.
They were not involved in the design process of the ballot screen, and this stings. Six of the seven “secondary” browsers (a representative of K-Meleon couldn’t be located) are now complaining that there isn’t enough visual indication that there are browsers to choose from to the right of the big five, and have sent an urgent petition to the EC to address this issue.
“Please know that we are not suggesting any major reevaluation or redesign of the Choice Screen at this time,” the petition reads, “We are only requesting the simple addition of *any* text or design element, that would indicate to an average user that there are choices ‘to the right of the visible screen’.”
The Secondary Six (sounds like a band of superheroes, doesn’t it?) state that a mere scrollbar isn’t enough, since horizontal scrolling is uncommon and not particularly liked by users. As such, they suggest including some sort of an indication that more is to be found ‘to the right’.
On a related note, Opera says they are already seeing an increase in downloads of the Opera browser since the ballot rollout. “Since the browser choice screen rollout, Opera downloads have more than tripled in major European countries, such as Belgium, France, Spain, Poland and the UK,” said Rolf Assev, Opera’s chief strategy officer. Of course, this could also be related to the fact Opera released a new version.
I’m waiting for the text-only Cygwin browsers to complain that they’re not in the list
Edited 2010-03-05 19:20 UTC
Ha, funny.
Although I think Arora should be on that list. It is probably better than those “New-IE-frontend” browsers.
And on a related note: Firefox has more than 50% market share in Germany!
That very much depends on which web stats you listen read.
eg technology / web development sites like this and w3c will have a higher percentage of non-IE browser hits than (for example) the German government website
Actually, lynx has a native win32 version.
I see it as an increase in Good Browser market.
Back when we had Netscape and IE. the rest were so out of date or weak that they could only do a few thing well.
When IE Won the browser war, Netscape was stuck on v. 4 for way too long. Making IE the only player for years. Then Mozilla came out of netscape But was still to “netscapey” Then firefox came out as a full featured browser with all the bells and whistles, that was needed and not the stuff that wasn’t so it was fast and good. So we were back to 2 browsers. Opera then came back as people realized they were never gone, and when they allowed a Free non-add version it made it that much more appealing.
Now Apple was stuck with IE5 while Windows had IE6 and no good development so Safari came out for OS X that had to be really good.
Then Chrome is the new guy but it went on the same trend.
So it is not a consolidation of browsers but an expansion of good ones that use the web.
With all this healthy competition going on why do we need the ballot?
Maybe because only one of them was pre-installed by default. Don’t forget, most non-technical Windows users see the blue ‘e’ logo on the desktop and believe that is the internet.
From what I understand, you only see the ballot screen if you have Internet Explorer set as your default browser when you do a windows update.
Everything I’m reading says that you get the browser ballot screen after you update if IE is set as default. Is this true? They bug users *after* their PCs are already set up and working? After they’ve had ample time to download a different browser if they want to? For Zark’s sake, how stupid is that? Then, on top of that, yet more browser makers aren’t happy. Well guess what, you’re never going to please everyone. Ever. I just hope that this flies out of control, partly so that I can watch but mostly so that they don’t do anymore ballots. This isn’t the answer to the problem, the answer is to pressure Microsoft *very heavily* to make IE follow the damn standards!
Makes me even more glad I don’t use Windows, but this is gonna be fun to watch. Bring the popcorn, I’ll bring the beer.
Installed security updates for a customer.
Browser ballot screen came up, immediately interrupted by the IE twenty questions screen which with default options, sets IE as the default browser. *facepalm* IE is just so awful on so many levels.
Every other browser does this. They all want to be default. Your fault for not reading through all the options presented.
I think the point was that the order in which things happen is stupid. For the ballot to come up and ask you to choose a default browser, which you do, then for IE to simply set it back to default if you’re not watching carefully. I can’t help but wonder if this is a bit deliberate, it’d certainly be a way to keep IE the default while appearing to work with the EU on this whole ballot thing.
FFS, first people complain Microsoft for not allowing choices and when they do they complain that! Atleast IE asks what search and other services you want to use, unlike Google whore Mozilla. “Want to use some other search? Well FU, we get money from Google.”
is that this ballot malarky may end up making me an IE user again out of sheer disgust with the other players in this parade of halfwits. It’s not about “web standards” anymore, it’s trying to garner market share via legislation
Well, to be fair, the only browser vendor that comes to mind as “pushy” in this whole affair has been Opera AFAICT.
Really. Then why doesn’t any of the other makers stand up and say it’s a stupid idea?
Apparently the half-wits who make Flock (which isn’t even a real browser) think it’s a great idea.
agreed. when a new player can get over 5% of the market in a year and a half through building a good product, I don’t think we are in bad shape. This should have happened about 12 years ago, nowadays there is almost a staggering amount of innovation in the browser market.
It’s not because chrome is good, it’s because google have advertised it so aggressively.
The majority of people running IE don’t know what a web browser is, they just click on “the internet – that big ‘e'”
People running any OS other than windows know that there are alternatives, but even users of FF and Chrome don’t necessarily know what a web browser is.
Point in case, my aunt just clicks on the fox for the internet. When I said firefox, she looked puzzled.
Because IE’s grip on the market kills web innovation, it is important that superior browsers are promoted.
Welcome to the market economy. Marketing matters here.
The US Department of Justice ridiculed Microsoft for saying that people could download a new web browser. At dial up spreads, downloading Netscape took a while. You had to really want it, to get it. A browser download screen would not have worked. Its like asking why Apple didn’t get into the mobile phone business in the 90’s.
Welcome to the fast paced world of government legislation.
LOL, maybe they should force MS to have somebody go to people’s houses in Europe, and offer to install a browser other than IE.
But hey, this isn’t all bad… Opera’s downloads have trippled because of this. Maybe by the time it’s all done, they’ll have marketshare of 3%, and that’s only assuming they’re extremely lucky
Personally, I hope those whiny little bitches go out of business. Then again, I’m still bitter because they broke text-to-speech in the Windows version and refuse to fix it 
Or maybe Opera should develop their own operating system and lock out other browsers?
I agree with that. But, the browser makers are not the first software companies to use legislation or the courts to increase their market share.
What goes around comes around.
Flock isnt a web browser of its own, it’s a firefox with few addons integrated on basic install
Do Macs and Linux offer a “browser ballot” in Europe?
Nope, and here’s to hoping this ballot syndrome doesn’t spread to any other platforms. Personally, I think Microsoft allowing the uninstall of IE is enough, that puts it on par with OS X, Linux, etc where the browser can quickly and easily be removed and replaced with whatever browser you want. Honestly, I’ll never use Opera out of sheer disgust for what they’ve started, the crybabies.
It does beg the question doesn’t it? And where does this end? Do the makers of media players now request a ballot? E-mail clients? Text editors? Calculator? Does Firefox now need to include a search engine ballot, because you know who is the default search engine for Firefox.
Who would have thought so much fighting over marketshare for free products.
Well the thing about Linux here is that you can uninstall the default browser. Distros pick which browser they want and as you may know, Linux doesn’t have a monopoly in the desktop market( you cannot fault a distro for picking Firefox because they actually ‘picked’ it).
This is what Microsoft get for locking in their software too tight, Apple do it too ( can you uninstall Safari?).
I wish people would get their facts straight about default browsers on other OS’s. Microsoft are in this position for a reason and other OS’s are not because they don’t have the IE tied into Windows/Monopoly deal.
Really. Can I uninstall KHTML? How well does GNOME work without GtkHTML?
Last time I checked (1 minute ago) it was perfectly possible to remove IE (that is the IE icon so it is effectively removed even though the engine is still there) and install alternative browers.
The browser ballot is a bullshit, pencil-pusher solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
You’re just being silly now and taking it to extremes.
Linux distros ‘select’ their own software to use, unlike Apple and Microsoft who just give you their own for profiting reasons. The reason why this all come about is because Microsoft forced IE onto the user, and tried to lock them into using their browser for their own profiting reasons.
I don’t see how you can apply this to any Linux distro, simply because you’re missing the point, and then think this must apply to every OS. Flawed logic for thinking this.
According to Harvard, 90% of errors are of perception, not logic.
It’s his choice for removing engines (no matter what the bleeding OS or distro).
Uhm yes, and they come with a default browser that you yourself have to replace if you don’t like it. There’s no bloody difference. Whether you can completely uninstall the rendering engine or not is completely immaterial.
Oh my GOD! They want to make a profit! The horror!
Seriously, wtf? Of course they do, just like the company you work for.
No one has ever been forced to use IE. It was there but the user was always free to use something else.
Granted some apps from MS will still use the trident engine but they’re MS apps and they can use whatever goddamn engine they want.
Like Firefox and Google?
Yes, Gnome works without gtkhtml. The help viewer won^A't work though (nor evolution), unless you’ve done something weird (like patching it to use webkit instead). The point however is not whether you lose functionality when removing the browser (of course you are losing functionality! DUH!), but whether you can remove the browser at all. Besides that one can always remove Gnome entirely and still have a working gnu/linux system.
GNUstep doesn’t ship with a browser component but still have the same desktop functionality as other DE’s (should that be DEs?). IE in Windows is a special case since IE today is a catch-all term for many disparage technologies where many has nothing to do with internet or internet-like functionality. This also makes removal of IE difficult. I mean, how do you uninstall a concept? You can at best remove the implementation of a concept, but then you have to establish the implementation and the implementation of IE is deliberately obscure.
EDIT: No, you cannot remove IE through any solution offered by Microsoft. You can only hide it (apart from the launching executable, which in itself contains nothing – not even gui code). The browser frontend is not removed (most of this can be found in IEFrame.dll) nor is any part of IE removed. Only easy access is removed. You may twist the words as you want to, but that doesn’t make you right, soulbender.
Edited 2010-03-06 13:53 UTC
You don’t have to repeat yourself, I KNOW all this.
I’m simply asking a basic question: what does it matter? Effectively, IE, the web browser, is gone. Sure, a lot of the code is still there – but why do I care? Between that or seeing weird bugs all over the place because applications or components count on IE – I’d rather pick the former.
Well, I was actually replying to soulbender.
It matters a lot. IE is effectively very much present. All of it. The average moro…Joe obviously won’t knpw the difference between being denied direct access (by primitive means) to the browser and having the browser completely removed. With all the code still in place all the attack angles are also in place. Not to mention the resource usage.
It’s true that complete removal of IE would create strange bugs, particularly in older applications. That’s why Microsoft should be forced to reimplement the IE-concept so full uninstallation of IE could be done. Basically undoing the unnecessary code integration between OS and browser (shell32.dll is one of many files to fix). Removing IE can definitely be done without losing functionality on the desktop but it does require some rewriting. This is where EU should be active, instead of forcing a silly ballot screen on all of us. And I’ll keep repeating that sentiment until the rest of you get your heads out of your behinds, and start to understand the architectural issues.
I agree with you.
1) You can also use GNU/Linux without gnome or kde, not having any sort of html rendering engine available.
2) Internet Explorer does not get removed even in Win7’s uninstaller. The framework is still there for applications to make use of – which is an attack vector.
I don’t agree with the Ballot, but I do agree IE should be completely 100% uninstallable, even if it breaks apps. Those devs shouldn’t be retarded and use IE rendering engines.
A hefty percentage of malware “counts on” IE being there as well.
A good deal of the better security of other platforms, and their consequent lack of any need to run anti-malware checkers, comes from the fact that they don’t have IE installed at all, not any part of it (in particular, they don’t have things like ActiveX installed, or Silverlight with its COM interfaces).
This is why it matters. If it were possible to remove a good deal of IE except for the core screen-rendering pieces (since those are used to display help pages amongst other things), so that the pieces that remained had no access at all to external data and could not be used at all as a web browser (similar to KHTML or GTKHTML trenderers), then it would be OK.
Who cares? Why is this important?
Yes, that’s what I said and for the end user this is pretty much the same as having it removed. If they can’t launch it with an icon it’s effectively not there.
I’ve never said it can be completely removed.
Let’s just agree to disagree
Fair comment.
Why are you contradicting yourself? Okay it’s probable to remove IE engine, so why do you want to keep it?
Get Win2K and use Fred Vorck’s method to remove the IE engine. Or use nLite or vLite for multi-coporate licensed XP or Vista (as product activation requires IE engine, in XP at least).
Sorry, but you miss the point.
KHTML is not a browser neither is GtkHTML.
KHTML is _used_ by a browser but it can be used by any app, like the help pages.
The same is true for Windows, if you uninstall IE you still can look at help pages as that part does not get removed.
So you don’t need to have Konqueror installed, you can uninstall it. In fact that depends on the distributions if they got the dependencies right –> konqueror should not be a hard dependency for most apps.
Other than that I agree on the usefulness of the browser ballot …
Neither is Microsoft’s Trident. What’s your point?
Uhm, yes, that’s what I said. It’s a prt of the system that you can chose not to use, to a certain degree. I cant chose the engine for khelp and I cant chose the engine for Windows update.
“Well the thing about Linux here is that you can uninstall the default browser.”
You said that this is not possible because you can’t uninstall KHTML etc. but you can in fact uninstall Konqueror.
It was about browsers and as it appears you mixed browsers with their rendering engines on purpose.
Linux doesn’t, but it’s only a kernel after all. GNU/Linux distributions usually don’t come with a browser ballot like the one MS has been forced to implement. However, since no GNU/Linux distribution comes with an uninstallable browser there is no problem. Besides that they don’t have a de-facto monopoly. Neither does Apple which is why they can get away with duplicating Microsofts behavior.
Server 2008 core does not install a browser so you can technically use Windows without one.
Neither does MS. There’s plenty of competition from Linux and Apple.
Heck, Apple is worse, it’s just that they’re not large enough to make a real impact.
True. It’s just that Windows Server 2008 Core does not come with a desktop. Windows Embedded 2011 is something I’m looking forward to as a Windows without IE.
Yes, but Windows is still a de facto monopoly. Competition is not relevant in regard to defining a de facto monopoly. Market share and mindshare are essential factors however. As well as vendor lock-in. Microsoft has a de facto monopoly on the desktop. It is changing though, but not enough.
True enough. There’s a reason I don’t buy anything from Apple.
Good Linux distro come with a software ballot — meaning they have a “Customize” button during the install procedure.
Usually at very least Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, and a couple of text browsers are included on the DVD.
People may also chose their desktop environment (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce,…), office suite (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord+Gnumeric,..).
Do Macs and Linux have browsers that are so ubiquitous they are capable of setting de facto web standards ?
Firefox?
I’m waiting for an operating ballot. Choose Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, or maybe even Syllable, Hurd, FreeDos.
Even better, let the computer randomly choose one for you. Everyone loves a surprise, you know.
Edited 2010-03-05 23:26 UTC
Thom. You didn’t uninstall IE. You only removed the launching executable (which contains next to nothing – it is not the IE-frontend) and removed some settings.
The sooner you get this the better.
…which is for the better, as I wouldn’t want my operating system to act all messed up because WebKit or whatever doesn’t work well as an integral part of Windows (like Trident does).
The net effect is still the same. The parts that matter are gone. You can’t uninstall WebKit from Mac OS X either.
Same for GNOME and its GTKHTML component and the engine that it’s compiled to use. These days, you need to have an HTML engine integrated into the environment. However, that does mean that if you run some malware that exploits the engine (as many exploit Trident now) you’re just as vulnerable. It can’t get in on its own, but it still doesn’t protect users from things they’re dumb enough to run explicitly.
You can uninstall the IE core, although Thom probably didn’t. It causes anything that depends on IE to fail, such as Extended Service View and some applications. It breaks less than you’d think though, I’ve had far more problems with applications not handling 64-bit.
You just need to use the WAIK to make your own install image and remove the following two packages:
Microsoft-Windows-InternetExplorer-Package
Microsoft-Windows-InternetExplorer-Optional-Package
Has anyone else been redirected to a porn site while trying to view the main page for GreenBrowser? It happened to me earlier today and someone at Ars also reported the same thing. I haven’t been able to reproduce it since then, but it sure would be interesting if the browser ballot starting serving up porn to unsuspecting users.
The browser ballot means we all lose. But hey if that’s the way to go I also want ballots for the below:
* Text editor
* Office suite
* File manager
* Shell
* Media Player
* Calculator
* Defrag utility
* Command prompt
Heck, pretty much every application has a 3rd party alternative that is better so lets just make ballots for all of them.
If we do this we all win, right?
I wish i could use windows without all the crap i dont need.
Just imagine windows without wordpad, notepad, madiaplayer, movie maker, hotmail, ie.
You would have a nice clean os (debatable, but cleaner then now anyways) where you can add your own programs too.
Sure some programs you can remove but others are just so integrated that you will be stuck with them really.
File manager, Shell, Defrag utility, Command prompt are just really part of an os and shouldnt be removed ofc.
Edited 2010-03-06 10:08 UTC
You can: http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html
Edited 2010-03-06 10:27 UTC
“Add/Remove Windows Components”
How could it be easier?
Can you imagine the bitching if a major operating system didn’t include any of those things?
Edited 2010-03-06 16:24 UTC
Oh come on, we know that’s not enough. There needs to be a ballot!
Plus, you can’t uninstall some of those with Add/Remove.
You can’t please everyone.