Internet Explorer will be Removable in Windows 7
Firefox, safari and chrome browsers
Maybe it was all those anti-trust suits home and abroad, or hearings before governments on bulllying tactics against rival browser companies, or maybe Microsoft wants to be seen as benovelent and not worried about market share anymore.
But why the sudden switch to the on-off switch configuration? Microsoft Group Program Manager Jack Mayo describes the change as coming from a desire to let customers use their “own criteria for choice.”
“We … want to strike the right balance for consumers in providing choice and balancing compatibility with applications and providing a consistent Windows experience,” Mayo stated in a blog posting Friday.
Of course, there’s also that pesky European Union filing that said Microsoft “shield[ed]” Internet Explorer from “head-to-head competition” by building the browser into Windows. Documents indicated the EU was looking at forcing Microsoft to let users disable at least portions of IE if they wanted to use another browser instead.
Microsoft has declined to comment on whether there’s any relation.
More noteworthy, however, is the overall trend: From the start of 2008 to the start of 2009, IE lost 10.49 percent of its market share. In the same timespan, Firefox gained 26.8 percent and Safari — while its totals are significantly smaller — saw a growth of 42.44 percent. If you use a simple mathematical analysis to project those rates of change into the future (as I did last month), you’ll see that Microsoft’s stronghold could slip away sooner rather than later, assuming the current trends continue. Regardless of how low it goes, though, one thing is certain: Internet Explorer is no longer the near-universal preference it once was.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:41 am
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