The past few days, there’s been a lot of talk about web browsers. The report that Google will be paying Mozilla close to one billion dollars over the next three years to ensure that their search engine remains the default for Firefox is fascinating for a few reasons. The biggest is that Google now makes a Firefox competitor, Chrome. And it got me thinking about Safari.
Remember Safari?
While Chrome has skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, depending on what numbers you look at. While its growth seemed to stall out in late 2008/early 2009, Safari has been growing again since then. But it has been at a very slow, methodical pace compared to the Google browser. → Read More
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.
But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really? → Read More
