● 03.24.10
●● When Only Half of Europe Browses the Web With Microsoft
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Free/Libre Software at 3:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Now that customers who were forced to get Windows with a new PC choose an additional Web browser, the declines in Microsoft’s share are seen
AS we noted last week, given real choice on Windows (there is still no operating system choice and it ought to be rectified), customers choose to avoid Internet Explorer and according to some statistics (which we take with a barrel of salt for obvious reasons), Microsoft loses market share in Europe.
According to Statcounter, IE use in France has dropped 2.5 percent since last month’s implementation of the ballot, 1.3 percent in Italy, and 1 percent in Britain. It’s still early days, and it’ll take more than this to chip away from IE’s 62 percent lead in the browser war, but it’s certainly not a good trend for Microsoft. With that in mind, we’re going to have to ask you to place your bets now.
Lora Bentley adds some necessary background about the problems with this ballot [1, 2, 3, 4].
That ballot debuted at the beginning of this month, and immediately, IBM’s Rob Weir had a problem with it. According to Computerworld, Weir said Microsoft failed to use a random shuffle algorithm. He said: “This was a rookie mistake. [It] is more in the nature of a ‘naive algorithm,’ like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least one of them would make the same mistake.”
More than anything else, it ought to say something about Microsoft’s poor programming skills and as we pointed out last week, it seems like Microsoft just copied someone else’s code. It would not be the first time and Microsoft does this illegally sometimes [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
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