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Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot
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| 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.
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http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser-ballot.html
Recent:
How Random Is Microsoftâs Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe?
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| 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.
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http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/microsoft-ballot-screen/
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