The first day of the week coincided with the first day of the month, March 1st. And as you may already know, March is the month when Microsoft started to roll out its choice screen, the browser ballot screen it came up with as a solution to the antitrust case in the EU. The choice screen is presented only to Windows users in the EU; and only to Windows users that have Internet Explorer set as the default browser.
The purpose of the browser ballot screen is to offer choices to the Windows users in the EU. It’s goal is to let these users know that they could use something other than the Microsoft-developed Internet Explorer browser. Hence the choice screen presents a total of 12 browsers, including Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Opera Software’s Opera and the socially oriented Flock browser.
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The choice screen presents links that the user can click to learn more about a specific browser; and links to download a specific browser. It is estimated that around 200 million computer users will get to see the browser ballot screen – which is a huge opportunity for Flock, the Firefox-based browser that puts the user’s social networking needs above all else. To put it bluntly, Flock is the perfect browser for the Facebook and Twitterholic.
On this occasion (the launch of the choice screen), Flock CEO Shawn Harding said “Flock is thrilled to have been selected as one of the top twelve browsers. The fact that millions of users can now choose a browser that fits their needs is the good news. Unfortunately, there’s some bad news too.”
The bad news is that the choice screen, as it is currently being delivered to users in Europe, looks like this. “Unfortunately, this Choice Screen design leaves most users unaware that there are more than five of the largest browsers to choose from,” explained Hardin. “So it doesn’t achieve the European Commission’s stated objective to provide ‘information on the 12 most widely-used web browsers and to allow users to easily download and install one or more of these web browsers’.”
Flock and 5 other companies have joined forces and presented a petition to the European Commission. Hopefully a quick fix will be found soon. The latest Flock release is version 2.5; you can download the browser here.
The first day of the week coincided with the first day of the month, March 1st. And as you may already know, March is the month when Microsoft started to roll out its 