EU ballot has planned effect on Microsoft share

Microsoft has lost share in web browsers since Europe's browser ballot was rolled out, new data confirmed today. While Internet Explorer's worldwide share has been largely stable, European data from Statcounter shows that the browser has lost almost 1 percent in the UK, 1.3 percent in Italy and 2.5 percent in France with about a month of the ballot being active in trial form. A full deployment is due in May.

Of the companies taking advantage of the dip, Opera has already said it had the greatest proportionate award with tripled downloads in some countries and double overall. Firefox has seen an unspecified amount of "significant growth," according to Mozilla, but is expected to see an increase once the ballot is fully launched.

Google hasn't commented on its gains, but it grew by 0.7 percent Europe-wide in the same time frame. Safari grew by just a tenth of a point, but its share is more dependent on Mac users and thus less affected by the ballot.

Critics have argued that the current ballot doesn't properly represent the full reach of browsers. Although several other browsers are available, the top five are always the same, and only a scroll bar indicates that more are options. The priority effectively guarantees that only certain browsers will be favored, companies argued. However, most of the alternatives, such as Flock and Maxthon, are variants of the engines behind Firefox and IE.

The European Commission can have the ballot altered before the official May release, but Microsoft has defended the ballot as-is.

By Electronista Staff