I know this is old news, but it still annoys me. Just for those who have not heard, this useful summary of the legal background to Browser Choice (rather than the technical details) describes the decision:

In December, the European Commission and Microsoft arrived at a resolution of a number of long-standing competition law issues. Microsoft made a legally binding commitment that PC manufacturers and users will continue to be able to install any browser on Windows, to make any browser the default browser, and to turn access to Internet Explorer on or off. In addition, Microsoft agreed to use Windows Update to provide a browser choice screen to Windows users in Europe who are running Internet Explorer as their default browser.

So, when I install shiny new Windows 7 machines for my clients with a perfectly serviceable browser (IE8) with some great security features such as protected mode, I make sure the Windows Update has brought everything up to date and BAM! An icon appears on their desktop and prompts them to choose what browser they want.

So I choose IE, delete the icon and everyone is happy.

This is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. The users who want an alternative still go and download the browser of their choice. Most don’t bother. Making a bad choice from the popup screen and deciding a while later you want to switch, or revert to IE is just a waste of people’s time, and in business this time will cost money. Across Europe this hidden cost will be huge.

The choice screen is currently only being pushed to users in UK, Belgium and France, but later will cover the whole of the European Economic Area. Just like the pointless “Windows N” without media player, this panders to niche software vendors without delivering any real value to anyone that cares. Pushing this out via Windows Update will only serve to confuse huge numbers of consumers. Many consumers are perfectly happy with the browser, media player, calculator and notepad that come with their computer. A few are not, and may go out and freely choose to install any software they wish, and pretty easily make it their default. Should we take away the simplicity of buying a PC, turning it on and using it? Why not strip out all of these free applications and make people go and download only the ones they choose? Once upon a time it was seen as a great idea that Microsoft (and Apple, and anyone else) gave away free software with their OS so you could just get up and running; this is now seen as anti-competitive.

There is lots of media buzz around Firefox, Chrome and other alternatives. Anyone that cares has probably read about these and can easily find out more and make their own choice. Presenting them with a screen in this way makes it feel like they have to make a choice, and then gives them options which are virtually impossible to distinguish – the fastest, shiniest, safest, most standards-compliant, most popular browser. How is any of this helping them to make an informed decision?

Next time you buy a box of cornflakes should it have a money-off voucher on the side which gives you a discount from any brand of breakfast cereal? Should it have helpful descriptions so you can choose an alternative to your normal shopping option? How would they differentiate themselves? The tastiest? Crispiest? Sugariest? Healthiest?

Is Internet Explorer really all that bad anyway?

Yes, I know some users will never hear about, or understand, or care enough to change their browser to an alternative. So what? IE8 is really a pretty good browser. I’ve been a Firefox user for years, and still use it as my main browser on a regular basis, mainly for some of the add-ons like NoScript and AdBlock Plus, but I do find myself using IE more often for sites that don’t load properly. In fact, the main thing which keeps me from using IE8 as my default browser is probably that I use IE for my Dynamics CRM work, and it is much easier for me to mentally separate by application than merely by tabs or sessions. The jump list for IE on Windows 7 makes more sense than for FF (frequent sites rather than local pages) and the ability to jump straight to a tab or open window from a list would be useful if I didn’t tend to have several dozen open tabs at any given time. I do find that Firefox seems to recover better than IE from crashes (of the app or of Windows) and get my tabs back more reliably (my laptop sometimes locks up when undocking and has to be forcibly powered off and cold started, and FF usually picks up where it left off).

I understand that publicly funded institutions like the BBC should not be in the business of advertising, and need to have disclaimers like “other listings magazines are available” (just in case you did not know there are alternatives to the Radio Times because you have lived in a cave and never visited a newsagent or supermarket in the last 25 years). I just don’t get why this should apply to a company whose prime objective is (and should be) to increase shareholder value. It’s that simple – their shareholders want to earn money, not make the world a fluffier warmer cuddlier place.

I tried Opera a year or so ago and at the time it was no better than Firefox (and worse in some ways), so inertia won out and I stuck with what I had been using for a few years. I would need a compelling reason to change, and I have not seen one yet from Opera. IE8 is beginning to convince me that Microsoft has the best alternative for me. Firefox went from nothing to holding a significant market share. Google Chrome is following nicely, albeit with a much bigger marketing budget and established brand.

Arguments may be made about which browser is the most secure – for me probably the biggest reason choose one over another right now since drive-by malware infections seem to be getting more frequent and worse to remove. There is certainly a discussion to be had about whether the same ruling should be made about Apple’s software bundling – I don’t care if they ship Safari and IE, should they not also be forced to provide the same breadth of choice as MS? What about their productivity applications? Should you get the choice to install OpenOffice (or some other third party option)? I have nothing against Apple, but they do seem remarkably immune to these sorts of legal challenges (because of their market share) when they are actually a much more closed shop bundling hardware and software together.

I wish the European Commission had better things to do with their time and my taxes than this kind of nonsense. I wonder if it makes any difference that the company making the noise about it (Opera) is European, and they felt duty bound to stand up to the perceived might of a US software giant.

What about non-MS applications bundled with new PCs?

A much better use of their time would be considering banning PC manufacturers from bundling trialware with PCs, or at least restricting this in a variety of possible ways:

• all trialware must come NOT installed, but give the user the choice to install it as part of their setup. This is NOT the same as giving them a choice not to register and run it.
• trialware must be free for at least the period of warranty of the hardware, usually at least a year
• before installing, the consumer should be told the current cost of continuing their subscription for longer than that trial
• if we can’t force them to not install it in the first place, there must be penalties for having uninstall routines which fail since the hardware is not fit for purpose with a half-uninstalled Norton suite on it which prevents other AV products working properly. Been there, sworn at that. Forcing me to download a separate removal tool is not an option unless you pay for my time in doing this. About £100 penalty should suffice.

I even object to bundling of unnecessary applications, browser toolbars, gadgets and other crapware, and double FAIL points for those which insist on trying to update themselves every day. Some are arguably designed to get the most out of your hardware (such as a utility to selectively switch off WLAN, Bluetooth or 3G connections), while others are just generic fluff. If a system builder installs Google toolbar I am surely less likely to feel a need for Yahoo toolbar. Isn’t this just the same anti-competitive behaviour MS is being accused of? Please at least give me the choice at the time of purchase to avoid all non-essential apps, especially those I could easily install later for free if I choose to. And while we are on the subject, Acrobat reader is NOT an essential app, and in light of recent security vulnerabilities, not far away from installing a backdoor for malware.

What do you think? Is this a big waste of money or an important decision for fair business practices? What browser(s) are you using right now and why?

Tagged: Browser Choice, Firefox, Foxit, IE8, Microsoft, Opera

I think I have a fairly normal, modern life. I don’t have a landline telephone or a 9-to-5 schedule. I do have two mobile phones and a 100-minute-a-day commute. At work I have TweetDeck permanently open on one of my three work monitors (Outlook and Internet Explorer 8 are open on the other two). I also have two Twitter accounts, six Windows Live IDs and a Yahoo! account I haven’t checked since 2001.

And yet it’s still hard to schedule a date night (with someone with a vested interest in making it all work out) much less poker night with my friends. And since we don’t live in an alternate Life on Mars reality where everything moves at the speed of 1973, I bet pencils, paper calendars and in-person meetings don’t work so well for you either.

So, while we can’t do too much about your commute or your work-life balance, Microsoft does have a few things you might not know about that should help you pull everyone and everything together.

1. Hotmail: The new Hotmail has a wealth of features to make working together easier –even if you can’t meet up in person. There are more than 350 million active Hotmail users, sending more than 8 billion messages a day. And more than 200 million of these folks also use Windows Live Messenger. So, chances are, your social network is already on Hotmail.

Collaborating with Hotmail is about to go from easy to ridiculously easy with the launch of Office Web Apps (see below). If you send one of the 350 million Microsoft Office documents shared on Hotmail each month, the recipient will be able to view and edit the doc in the browser –even if they don’t have Microsoft Office on their computer. In my opinion, this is the coolest new feature since snap. Sharing pictures has also never been easier. You can automatically upload them to SkyDrive (which gives you 25GB of free space) and a link will be sent to the recipient or look at them as high resolution thumbnails right within your email.

2. SkyDrive: SkyDrive is probably the best Windows Live service you don’t know you have at your fingertips. It’s a virtual 25GB hard drive, and it’s yours free with a Windows Live ID. Upload anything you want and it’s safely stored. It’s great for group projects when you can’t actually meet in person.

Personal tip: I store the picture page of my passport on SkyDrive so if it’s ever lost a copy is just an internet connection away.

3. Office Web Apps: The technical preview (or beta) of Microsoft Office Web Apps is available now and the release version is coming soon. Office Web Apps are great for folks on a budget (and just about everyone in college). What’s not to love about a free, online version of Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint? Pair them with Hotmail (see above) and Sky Drive and you have a complete virtual workspace.

4. Last.fm: Finally, whether you’re flying solo or wrestling with a group, no one should have to work in silence. While not as popular as Pandora, I’m partial to Last.fm. I think the online interface is slick and the downloadable scrobbler is cool. If you’re into electronic music, the Tiësto station returns particularly groovy results.

Hit me up anytime @winashbrown on Twitter.

Users are continuously getting smarter and more educated about the things criminals are doing on the web. Because of this, the criminals have to change their tactics. One of the ways they are doing this is by buying ads on prominent web sites, and finding ways to serve up malicious content through those ads. Some of these websites might be some of your favorite websites you visit regularly and you might be thinking “hey, I only visit good websites” – unfortunately even “good” websites (websites not intending to harm the reader in any way) can be affected.

Many websites make the money it takes to operate through displaying ads from an ad network. Through that ad network, a website can unknowingly display a malicious ad on their website which puts their readers at risk. CNET recently posted an article about ad networks from Google, Fox, and Yahoo serving out malicious advertisements. This is not something that affects just one ad network, it’s an industry issue.

TechCrunch (a favorite website of mine) is a recent example of a website unknowingly delivering malicious advertisements from 3rd parties to their readers. A few pages on TechCrunch were blocked by Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter. The SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8 was blocking several posts from TechCrunch due to malicious content being included in ads that TechCrunch’s ad network was serving to the readers of TechCrunch.

We were able to see the SmartScreen Filter in action keeping the TechCrunch readers using Internet Explorer 8 safe from the malicious ads.

Since launch, Internet Explorer 8 has blocked over 560 million malware sites. This averages out to be about 3 million blocks per day. Because of this ongoing thread with malicious advertisements, it is important to use a browser that keeps you safe and protected.

Back in August, I wrote a blog post about how Internet Explorer 8 offers the best protection against socially engineered malware threats. This week, NSS Labs released a new study that continues to show Internet Explorer 8 to be the #1 browser in blocking malware! When the first study was revealed, the Internet Explorer Team announced that Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter had provided over 80 million blocks of malware. Almost a year after Internet Explorer 8 shipped, Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter has provided over 560 million blocks of malware – averaging over 3 million blocks per day! Wow.

The SmartScreen Filter uses a special URL Reputation Service (URS) with data centers hosted around the world and has evaluated over 250 billion URLs to help keep Internet Explorer 8 users safe! Every day, the SmartScreen Filter URS processes about 4.1 billion URLs looking for malicious websites and files; and since it was first introduced in Internet Explorer 7, the URS has processed over 5.7 trillion requests!

Malware is the biggest and most common security threat facing people browsing the Internet today, and Microsoft is investing heavily in keeping people protected while using Internet Explorer with features like the SmartScreen Filter, Protected Mode, DEP, and more. Check out this post on the IEBlog for more info about the NSS Labs study and how to make sure the SmartScreen Filter is turned on. If you’re not already running Internet Explorer 8, or haven’t upgraded, this is a great reason!

Over the weekend, a widespread phishing scam hit Twitter where users were lured in through bad links via Direct Messages that ultimately let spammers take over their Twitter account. Once the spammers take over a person’s Twitter account, they send out mass Direct Messages to all of that person’s friends on Twitter. Some of you may have been impacted by this, and I know some of my friends were as I received some of these spam Direct Messages from this phishing scam. If you receive a Direct Message from someone that has the message of “lol, this is you” that offers a link to a website called “bzpharm” – do not click the link. Email the person that sent you that Direct Message and let them know their account has been hacked and that they should change their Twitter password. Here is a good article on what to do if your Twitter account has been hacked or you suspect it may have been hacked.

These types of phishing scams on popular social networking sites like Twitter highlights that the threat landscape continues to evolve – and at a rapid pace. Social networks open up more opportunities to deliver malware and phishing scams to people who it looks like you trust.

These types of phishing attacks also serve as a good reminder that it is extremely important to have a modern browser like Internet Explorer 8 to help protect you from spammers. In the case of this weekend’s phishing scam that hit Twitter, there were two ways Internet Explorer 8 helped alert people to the threat.

When I clicked on the link I received via a Direct Message from a friend on Twitter whose account was hacked that said “lol, this is you” this screen appeared in Internet Explorer 8:

Based on this screen, I totally knew something was very wrong with this link. There are a few things to pay attention to here. First – the real domain is in dark black in the address bar. I may have thought I was being directed to Twitter.com based on the URL in the message, but with this it is clear that the real URL is “bizpharma.net” which was *not* where I thought I was going to. This is a great example of a common technique phishers use to trick people with a formula of “siteyoutrust.phishingsite.com” betting that people will see the site they trust first and feel safe. By highlighting the real domain in black in the address bar and making it stand out from the rest of the URL, Internet Explorer 8 makes it clear you’re on a site you may not know.

The other way that Internet Explorer 8 tells you something is wrong is hard to miss – all that red! It’s like Red Alert from the Starship Enterprise. Except that we aren’t dealing with Klingons here. This is the SmartScreen Filter in action as seen with the huge red screen and big red shields with Xs on them. The role of the SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8 is to keep a comprehensive list of sites that are suspected of malware or phishing attacks and alert people to the potential danger in a way that’s very clear and easy to understand. As you may recall from a post we did last summer, the SmartScreen Filter is super effective, making Internet Explorer 8 the best browser at protecting people from malware and phishing attacks.

Seeing that some of my friends were hit by this phishing scam on Twitter over the weekend, I thought it would be a good idea to remind folks on how a modern browser like Internet Explorer 8 can help prevent having your Twitter account taken over by spammers.

If you are not using Internet Explorer 8 then upgrade today.

This week, Net Applications released their January browser market share report. Their report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is not only the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share, but that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS’s on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis (data provided by Net Applications). We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly – making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide.

There are many reasons people choose which browser to use. Most people want to know and trust the company behind their browser. And people are looking a browser that protects them – and their privacy online. In an August 13th, 2009 post on the IEBlog, we announced Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter had hit over 80 million malware blocks. But that was back in August. As of today, Internet Explorer 8 has done over 350 million malware blocks. You can see Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter in action in this blog post. Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter blocks malware over 2 million times a day.

Phishing is a very serious threat to people browsing the Internet today – a criminal attempt to secure people’s personal information online, generally spread through email directing unsuspecting consumers to fake websites and asking them to enter sensitive information . With Internet Explorer 7, we introduced the Phishing Filter, and have continued to improve on it in Internet Explorer 8. Together, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have blocked a total of over 125 million phishing sites.

You may have recently heard about organizations including Google recommending that people update their browsers and move off older versions, such as the nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6.  Think about what technology and the Internet were like in the year 2000 – and consider how they’ve evolved since then. In 2000, “phishing” was something that happened at the lake, not online. There was no social networking, no RSS feeds, and no real blogs. It was a different time – and people’s browsing needs were different. Today’s Internet calls for more.

We support this recommendation to move off Internet Explorer 6. Modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 bring benefits for customers and developers alike. We realize there are some customers today who depend on Internet Explorer 6, and while we continue to support them through the lifecycle of the product, we are also investing in the tools and training to help them upgrade as well.