By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 16, 2009, 12:36 PM
In a blog post yesterday first noticed by Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer, a member of Mozilla’s user experience team — stating she was not writing on behalf of Mozilla, as the organization allows — suggested that Microsoft’s revised proposal for a Web browser selection screen for European Windows users still isn’t fair enough to the browser market.
Because more computer users are accustomed to the typical ways to install software, states Mozilla UX team member Jenny Boriss, they may assume that the first choice that appears in a list is the preferred choice. In Microsoft’s original proposal, Internet Explorer 8 appeared in the leftmost column. But in the company’s more neutral alternative as proposed last March, it placed browsers in columns sorted in alphabetical order by their manufacturer. As a result, Apple Safari fell first.
“Aside from being unfair to the other browsers, the problem is that past consumer choice has shown that Safari does not provide an ideal browsing experience on Windows,” Boriss writes. “Taking IE out of the equation because of its advantage as the bundled browser, the free market really does show what Windows users prefer. Safari has the smallest market share of the five other browsers at 2.6%. Frankly, Safari is a good browser for Apple computers, but Apple hasn’t put much effort to make it competitive on Windows. It’s just not their priority. So, by listing Safari first, the ballot is presenting as the recommended item the browser that is least likely to be the one the user wants. This leads to users having a bad experience using the Web, and ultimately hurts the user and the market.”
