Opera Browser Downloads Triple After Microsoft Airs Browser Ballot

by admin March 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Turns out that Opera, Mozilla, and Google’s gripes about Microsoft’s browser favoritism were accurate, it appears

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is the slowest of the major browsers on the market, but it (along with its previous editions) is also currently still clinging to almost 60 percent market share. Some say the large market share is because it’s relatively secure (despite a large number of attacks due to its major market share) and because its easily managed with IT software. None of that explains the high consumer usage, though, as the general public typically isn’t overly informed when it comes to security and doesn’t use any sort of IT management tools.

Norway-based Opera Software, who manufactures a popular third-party browser, complained that the reason Microsoft dominated in this increasingly lucrative market was not as a result of merit, but rather via anticompetitive techniques — by bundling Internet Explorer with its ubiquitous Windows OS. It successfully petitioned European Union antitrust regulators to mandate Microsoft to adopt a “ballot screen” approach with Windows, giving users a free pick from a variety of browsers. That feature went online this week.

Read more: dailytech.com