The Browser War Continues: Choose Your Weapon!

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use.

Accordingly, as of today, a ballot screen can be downloaded via Windows Update (or automatically downloaded if you have this set up in XP, Vista or Windows 7) which will ask users to choose between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera as their default browser.  Microsoft are calling the initial roll out a “test” of the choice screen, which will be followed by a full roll-out in early March.

So which browser will you choose? What will the market share pie chart look like this time next month? Will the anti-corporate outrage deliver big wins for the little guys? Or will people just keep doing what they’ve been doing? Presumably people who care about this sort of thing are already using their browser of choice so, no biggie, and those who don’t care…well, they probably still don’t care. My guess is that there may be a little shuffling of deck chairs, with IE losing some ground to the other browsers, but ultimately I’d be surprised if we saw a dramatic shift in any direction.

Still, anything can happen in the wild and wacky world of the interweb, so I’ll make sure to have the brown sauce on hand if the time comes to eat my words…