Microsoft Flips Kill Switch on EU Browser Ballot

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Has it been five years already?

Technology news can make you feel old. To wit, it may not seem like five years has passed since Microsoft agreed to a five-year deal in which Windows users in Europe would be offered a choice of browser upon first boot, but that commitment is not behind the Redmond outfit. Having lived up to its end of the deal, Microsoft has yanked the so-called browser ballot, which may not have done much anyway.
The browser ballot came about following an investigation by the EU's Competition Commission into Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft agreed to show users in Europe a browser screen with download links to other browsers for a period of five years, though the company still faced a fine -- a technical oversight in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 inadvertently removed the ballot screen in 2013, resulting in a $732 million penalty for Microsoft.
While it's been costly for Microsoft, there's not much evidence that the ballot screen did much good for other browsers. As pointed out by ComputerWorld, Opera lost 27 percent of its global usage share between December 2009 and November 2014, based on stats by StatCounter. Firefox fell even harder, dropping 42 percent of its share. There's a bit of irony there, as Opera Software and Mozilla were most critical of what they perceived as Microsoft's unfair advantage in the browser wars.
What does the EU think? In an email to ComputerWorld, the EU called the browser ballot a "successful remedy," noting that it saw 795 million views resulting in 165 million browser installs.
Image Source: Flickr (Robert Scoble)
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