It follows a lengthy legal battle in Europe which has seen Microsoft accused of anti-competitive behaviour because it bundles Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. This means that many computer users don’t realise there are alternative browsers available — amusing given that many users don’t really appreciate what a ‘browser’ really is.

Us geeks have been switching in droves to alternatives such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, but most ’standard’ users have stuck with IE out of ignorance.

It’s interesting that Apple, though having a significantly lower market share, hasn’t been officially questioned over its bundling of the Safari browser with OS X.

Windows users who have already switched to another browser won’t be presented with the list of options, which includes Avant, Chrome, Firefox, Flock, Green Browser, K-meleon, Maxthon, Opera, Safari, Sleipnir, Slim — and Internet Explorer of course.

Who’ll benefit the most from this? Browser manufacturers, most likely, and IT helpdesks. For those of us who are unpaid technical support for friends and relatives, it may be a potential headache but at least it forces the issue that it’s generally a good thing to switch away from Internet Explorer.

Whether my mum and dad are going to suddenly dive into using Firefox is another matter — I doubt it somehow.

Interestingly, the list of choices will be randomised to a certain extent, with the big five (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE) appearing in random order on the first section and the other seven randomly spread out below.

What do you think of this move?

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Results vary from continent to continent, with Firefox being a lot more popular in Europe than North America, for example.

The complete Internet Explorer collection still significantly outranks Firefox. IE6 alone is still in use by nearly one in six users.

I decided to take a look at a couple of our websites.

Firstly, Forever Geek, which you’d expect to be frequented by a more tech-savvy crowd, confirmed my belief.

Last month, Firefox overall had 50% visitor share, compared to Internet Explorer’s 30%, while in November ‘08, IE had been sitting with 35% and FF still at 50%.

Moving to a site concerned with celebrity gossip, and likely to be frequented by a wider range of users, I found that IE took at 46% share compared to FF on 35%.

Again, Firefox had held its 35% share since November ‘08, whereas IE had slipped from 51%.

Not particularly scientific, I grant you, but it’s interesting that in both cases, Microsoft’s browser has slipped five percentage points, while Mozilla’s baby has held its share.

There are a few more interesting numbers for those who enjoy this sort of thing.

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Playing Flash versions in a browser window is old hat, so how about using the browser windows themselves as the ball and bats?

That’s what the developers at stewdio.org have done.

Browser Pong has been written to take advantage of the latest HTML 5 specification, which is why it doesn’t work in standards-mashers like Internet Explorer.

Graphically advanced it’s not, though if you fancy cheating it’s pretty easy — just expand one of the “bat” browser windows fully vertically. Easy.

Browser Pong (Via)

The search engine giant has finally released the long rumored web browser that it has been developing over the last two years. Google Chrome, according to its engineers, the open source browser is not a content viewer as much as a window manager for web pages and applications. I dunno exactly what that means but the result is a zippier web experience. Pages that I frequent with both IE and Firefox load much faster in Chrome. This has got me really excited as another alternative in the browser space is very welcome. I also love the very minimalist UI of Chrome. There are no space-eating icons and bars. It’s a pure web browsing experience.

Let’s see if the upcoming Safari 4.0 will further heat up the browser market.