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Upgrades of Windows 10 reset the default browser to Microsoft's new Edge browser, and this has caused Mozilla CEO Chris Beard to issue an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella:
[T]he update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.
[...] We appreciate that it's still technically possible to preserve people's previous settings and defaults, but the design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult. It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows. It's confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost.
Firefox's market share continues to drop by varying degrees according to analysis by Martin Brinkmann of ghacks.net.
takyon: Microsoft reports that 14 million users took the plunge and installed Windows 10 yesterday. Microsoft has stated it wants Windows 10 on 1 billion devices within the next 3 years.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday July 31 2015, @03:43PM
I have certainly stepped into a time machine and traveled backwards to about 2003,
The difference this time round is that there are huge numbers of phones, tablets, Macs and other devices being used to browse the web, and adherence to public standards is vital for anybody publishing on the web. Even Microsoft's current browsers are significantly more standards compliant than they were back in the day (when IE was also the dominant browser on Mac). Microsoft might be able to claw back some market share on browsers for Windows, but it is less likely that we'll backslide to the position where the whole web was built around IEs quirks.
Also, from an anti-trust point of view, technology has moved on and I think its easier to claim that http clients, HTML rendering and JavaScript are core operating system features rather than optional applications. Its also pretty typical now for new devices to come with powerful application suites (c.f. the good old days of minimal utilities like Notepad & Paint). Also, the web browser and its components are possibly the main security 'attack surface' which is Apple's justification for blocking true third-party browsers from iPhone/iPad.
We'll never know how much of IEs market share decline was down to the EU mandated browser choice screen, and how much was due to the complacent, standard-flouting, omnishambolic malware gateway that passed for Internet Explorer at the time.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Friday July 31 2015, @07:38PM
I think now the difference is Microsoft is lacking absolute dominance in browsers and desktops. In 2003 their market shares for both were higher than today.
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