According to Microsoft

Mar 9, 2010 12:45 GMT  ·  By

The browser choice screen software update that is currently being offered to Windows users in the European Economic Area who have set Internet Explorer as default has been itself updated. Microsoft confirmed officially that it had tweaked the randomizing algorithm behind the browser ballot screen in order to ensure that the position occupied by the browsers was indeed random. The change was implemented after IBM’s Rob Weir — revealed that the ballot wasn’t generating random results, as it was intended, but instead showed certain items in specific, repetitive positions.

“We can confirm that we made a change to the random icon order algorithm in the browser choice screen for Europe. We are confident the algorithm change will be an improvement. As always, we are grateful for the feedback we get from developers, and we thank those who commented on the topic and suggested changes,” Kevin Kutz, director, Public Affairs Microsoft, noted.

Microsoft is serving the browser ballot screen to all Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users in Europe as per an agreement with the European Commission in order to drive choice for customers. Only users who have Internet Explorer set as the default browser will get the refresh automatically through Windows Update, allowing them to also opt for one of the following browsers: Avant Browser, Flock, Google Chrome, GreenBrowser, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Sleipnir, and Slim Browser.

The erroneous algorithm used initially for the browser ballot caused Internet Explorer to appear with predilection, more than 50% of the time in the last position out of the first five items. At the same time, due to the algorithm, Google Chrome’s position was one of the first thee browsers with predilection. Microsoft is now saying that it has resolved this problem.

“If you search Google for ‘javascript random array sort’ the first link returned will be a Javascript tutorial that has the same offending code as Microsoft’s algorithm. This is not surprising. As I said in my original post, this is a well-known mistake. But it is no less a mistake. If you use Google Code Search for the query ‘0.5 – Math.random()’ lang:javascript you will find 50 or so other instances of the faulty algorithm. So if anyone else is using this same algorithm, they should evaluate whether it is really sufficiently random for their needs. In some case, such as a children’s game, it might be fine. But know that there are better and faster algorithms available that are not much more complicated to code,” Weir explained.

Here is a choice of browsers:

Avant Browser 11.7 Build 46
is available for download here.

Flock 2.5.6 is available for download here.
 
GreenBrowser 5.3.0203 is available for download here.

K-Meleon 1.5.3 is available for download here.

Maxthon is available for download here.

Sleipnir 2.9.3 is available for download here.

SlimBrowser 4.12 is available for download here.

Safari 4 is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome 4.0 Stable is available for download here.

Opera 10.50 is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).