23 February 2010 | Author: J. Cave SEO Consultant

Microsoft opts for ballot screen

Following some recent legal talks with European antitrust officials, Microsoft has agreed to provide its European users with a ballot screen. Essentially, the screen will provide European users with a list of browsers to download (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer), rather than just Internet Explorer.

So how does the 'Ballot Screen' work? The Javascript powered page provides users with a choice of rival browsers and Microsoft's owner Internet Explorer, in random order.

Microsoft opts for ballot screen

Slovakian Tech News DSL.SK have been running their own tests to see just how random the sequence is. Surprisingly, after refreshing the page thousands of times, the results were not in Microsoft's favour. In fact, it was Google chrome which seemed to be favoured the most, likely to land in one of the first three spots around 90 per cent of the time compared to Internet Explorer which was only 37.6 per cent.

According to the latest browser stats from W3Counter, Internet Explorer is still the world's most popular browser holding almost 50 per cent of the market share. Meanwhile Firefox takes second place with 32.3 per cent, followed by Chrome, Safari and Opera respectively. What the effects of Microsoft's new Ballot Screen will be on these figures is anyone's guess, but even if it does happen that the first three slots of the Ballot Screen are in fact the worst or that most users will still continue to download IE anyway, the European Antitrust agreement is unlikely to impact positively on Microsoft's browser market share.