What impact will the browser ballot screen have?

gallery

The start of this month saw Microsoft start rolling out its long promised ballot screen across its Windows operating system.

You probably know the back story to this one already: the brief version is that as a concession to the European Commission, which was set to order Microsoft to sell Windows 7 without Internet Explorer bundled in, the Redmond giant instead offered to provide a screen allowing end users to choose their browser when the software first started.

It wasn’t an instantly accepted idea, but it soon seemed to make sense as the best compromise option.

The problem of the ballot screen, of course, is that it’s inherently flawed no matter which way Microsoft played it. The silent majority of Windows users, you’d wager, have little interest in choosing a web browser, and were happy with having one complicity selected for them.

Thus, when the ballot screen actually appears for the first time, it’s inevitably going to add confusion. In many cases, you wouldn’t rule out the end user not even knowing what a web browser was.

Take, for instance, Google Chrome’s billboard ad campaign a few months back. That led to many gazing at it and wondering what it was exactly that was being advertised.

Take your pick

The browser ballot is not helped by the text that appears on the screen itself. Each of the five browsers that appears on the first ballot screen gets an allocation of text within which to sell itself, a virtual QVC slot if you will. But just look at the text that has been chosen, and ask yourself just how helpful it actually is.

Chrome is “A fast new browser. Made for everyone”. That’s helpful, and sounds just the job. But what’s this? Safari is “the world’s most innovative browser”, the top priority of Firefox is “online security”, Internet Explorer is “designed with you in mind” while Opera is “powerful and easy-to-use”.

They’re not selling features. Ultimately, they’re trading slogans, and without a constant aggregation of review scores for each, or something of that ilk, the ballot screen has been made as bland and attractive yet utterly unhelpful as Microsoft would presumably like it to be. You get a logo and some marketing bumpf, and that’s your lot.

It’s hard to come up with too many ways it could have done it differently, to be fair. And it has now employed factors such as randomising the order in which the browsers appear - one of the later concessions that Microsoft had to make.

But Internet Explorer is nonetheless the world’s most recognisable name in the browser market still, and while the likes of Opera are likely to benefit from the extra exposure, a sizeable number of people will inevitably choose their browser based on which one they’ve actually heard of.

A few more won’t care and will pick one at random - we wonder if Firefox highlighting security may prove to be its best marketing tactic of all time, given the blah-filled description of the others - and the rest are arguably going to know their desired browser before they begin anyway.

Explorer

Still, the market remains Internet Explorer’s to lose, even if most agree that long-term, that’s perhaps what’s going to happen.

Email to a friend

Print this page