BrowserChoice.eu

» see browserchoice.eu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never saw the screen. turkey sits outside the european economic area, and the ballot was written into a settlement that stopped at that line, so a windows machine in ankara booted the way it always had with internet explorer sitting there as the default and nothing asking me about it. i picked firefox off a download page like everyone else here did, one machine at a time.

inside the eea it worked differently for four years. opera software filed a complaint with the european commission in december 2007 arguing that shipping ie inside windows was how microsoft kept the browser market. the commission agreed, and in december 2009 microsoft signed a commitment binding for five years: any windows user in the region whose default was internet explorer would be shown a choice.

the screen arrived through windows update in march 2010. twelve browsers, the top five in randomized order so no vendor could claim position bias, the rest reachable by scrolling sideways. internet explorer was one option among them, listed like the others, on an operating system microsoft had written. the second row is where the odd names lived, flock and sleipnir and maxthon and later rockmelt, browsers that got the biggest audience of their lives from a regulator's remedy.

by the commission's own count it was shown 795 million times and led to about 165 million browser installs. those are the numbers of a mass-market product, generated by a compliance obligation nobody wanted to run.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the immediate effect was real and small. firefox and opera both reported download spikes in european markets in the weeks after rollout, opera loudest of all, since it had brought the complaint and had the most to gain from being on a list next to the default.

the longer effect was not the one anyone planned for. by 2010 the browser that was actually taking share was chrome, pushed by google's own front page and its bundling deals, and the ballot handed it a free installer on hundreds of millions of european desktops. a remedy designed to rescue the browser market from one monopoly helped seat the next one.

~ the decline ~

microsoft shipped windows 7 service pack 1 in february 2011 without the ballot code. the screen stopped appearing on new machines and nobody at the company noticed for fourteen months, or nobody said so, until july 2012. roughly 28 million pcs never showed it.

microsoft called it a technical error. the commission fined it 561 million euros in march 2013, the first time a company had been penalized for breaking a commitment it had itself offered in an antitrust settlement. that fine is the part lawyers still cite. the ballot screen itself is a footnote in the same case file.

~ what it became ~

the obligation expired in december 2014 and microsoft removed the ballot immediately. browserchoice.eu was cut down to a line telling visitors to go to the browser makers' own sites, and it dropped off the web entirely during 2015.

the idea did not stay dead. the choice screen came back a decade later on phones, where the digital markets act now forces apple and google to offer the same thing for browsers and search engines, again in randomized order, again with a compliance deadline attached. anyone who saw one of those screens on an iphone in 2024 was looking at a rebuilt version of a windows dialog from 2010 that most of europe clicked through without reading.

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