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[News] [Rival] Microsoft Cheats in Browser Ballot

  • Subject: [News] [Rival] Microsoft Cheats in Browser Ballot
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:42:11 +0000
  • Followup-to: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/4.3.1
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Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot

,----[ Quote ]
| The story first hit in last week on the 
| Slovakian tech site DSL.sk.  Since I am not 
| linguistically equipped to follow the 
| Slovakian tech scene, I didnât hear about the 
| story until it was brought up in English on 
| TechCrunch.  The gist of these reports is 
| this: DSL.sk did a test of the âballotâ 
| screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in 
| Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to 
| install a browser.  It was a Microsoft 
| concession to the EU, to provide a randomized 
| ballot screen for users to select a browser.  
| However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the 
| ordering of the browsers was far from random.
| 
| But this wasnât a simple case of Internet 
| Explorer showing up more in the first 
| position.  The non-randomness was pronounced, 
| but more complicated.  For example, Chrome 
| was more likely to show up in one of the 
| first 3 positions.  And Internet Explorer 
| showed up 50% of the time in the last 
| position.  This has lead to various theories, 
| made on the likely mistaken theory that this 
| is an intentional non-randomness.  Does 
| Microsoft have secret research showing that 
| the 5th position is actually chosen more 
| often?  Is the Internet Explorer random 
| number generator not random?  There were also 
| comments asserting that the tests proved 
| nothing, and the results were just chance, 
| and others saying that the results are 
| expected to be non-random because computers 
| can only make pseudo-random numbers, not 
| genuinely random numbers.
`----

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser-ballot.html


Recent:

How Random Is Microsoftâs Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe?

,----[ Quote ]
| More than once out of every four hits, the
| page would show Google Chrome on the far
| left, and Internet Explorer would only make
| it to the first spot in 13,8% of page loads
| (scoring well below all four other
| browsers). In fact, in over 50% of all page
| hits, Internet Explorer would come out to
| the far right spot of the five browser
| choices shown on the screen.
`----

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/microsoft-ballot-screen/
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