Microsoft has tweaked the algorithm generating the browser selection display that it's pushing out to European Union end users consequently with the European Commission;s findings in an antitrust situation there.Shortly immediately after Microsoft began pushing the browser ballot to Windows users in the EC who've Net Explorer set up as their default browser (on March one), numerous parties began complaining about it.TechCrunch noted that there appeared to be some thing amiss concerning the way Microsoft;s browser ballot was “randomizing” the choices,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus, back on February 22 — before Microsoft released the ballot in final form to clients across the EU. Once the ballot was released on March 1, some with the browser vendors whose products were on page 2 of the ballot were unhappy they weren;t on page 1. IBMer Rob Weir — a vocal critic of Microsoft;s during the OpenDoc vs. Open Document Format standards battles — said he;d found that the ballot wasn;t actually producing random results, as it was supposed to do.Before the final version with the ballot was approved, Microsoft was planning to list the top browsers by market share in alphabetical order by vendor, but after push back from some of its competitors,
Office 2007 Key, scrapped that plan in favor of an algorithm-generated random listing.Microsoft officials acknowledged the company made a change for the algorithm behind the ballot, but declined to say exactly when this happened,
Office 2007 Download, or to concede that complaints were behind its move (other than to make a refernce to developer feedback inside the official comment on the topic).“We can confirm that we made a change to your random icon order algorithm in the browser choice display for Europe. We are confident the algorithm change will be an improvement. As always, we are grateful for the feedback we get from developers, and we thank those who commented on the topic and suggested changes,” said Kevin Kutz, Director,
Office Home And Business, Public Affairs, in an e-mailed statement.Consequently of its antitrust settlement using the EC in the Opera browser-bundling situation, Microsoft is required to offer he browser ballot screen — which lists the top 12 (by market share) browsers that run on Windows, with information about each — to Windows consumers in most of the countries in Europe.Last week,
Office 2010 Home And Business, ECIS, a European lobbyist group comprised of various Microsoft competitors, started agitating for Microsoft to offer the browser ballot to Windows users outside the EC.(Thanks to ArsTechnica which mentioned Microsoft;s browser-ballot algorithm change in a mention on its site on March 8.)