Microsoft offers browser choices: “Microsoft is to ask millions of Europeans who use Windows if they want to switch to a rival web browser.”
(Via BBC News.)
Lots to say on this one.
It is probably a bad/confusing idea for Microsoft to do this, but they didn’t have the choice. Isn’t the European Union great :} Forcing people to make a choice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m for having a choice, but mu argument is that the people who want to make the choice, probably have already made it.
Yes, there are people out there that didn’t know they have a choice and they are probably going to be baffled by having it! They will not have the knowledge to make an informed choice on it, so they will probably pick IE, since that is what they have used before
Then there are all of those ‘unofficial’ tech support people out there (like me!) who have to make the choice for other members of their families. Yes I had to do this for my dad. And what did I pick? IE8 of course!
Why?
Because for the no technical user it is the best choice, its not the most secure (chrome probably is), but it is way better than it was. It’s not the most fully featured (opera is), it’s not the most standards compliant (thats split between opera/chrome/safari). It’s not the fastest (chrome/safari split again?), but it is the browser petty much every site will have been tested against.
For no technical users and the technical ones as well, knowing that a site will ‘just work’ is a good thing.
And if I had a PC in this situation what would I do? Well for a start I probably wouldn’t get the choice since I would have had the top 5 browsers installed any way, but yes, most of the time I would probably stick with IE8 as well. I’ve said this before, but to me a web browser is just a window, that I view web pages through. What the window looks like to me doesn’t matter, as long as it works I really don’t mind!
This is why with all of the browsers I have installed on my Mac, I still use Safari 95% of the time. Oh an yes, I didn’t realise there where so many other browsers available on the PC, 12 of them in total. I’m surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be there is probably a similar number on Mac too (I can think of 8 stright away!)
Tags: microsoft
