Smaller browser makers are unhappy with the implementation

Mar 4, 2010 13:37 GMT  ·  By

The effects of the recently introduced browser ballot screen in Microsoft Windows are already beginning to be seen. Opera, the browser with the smallest market share out of the first five that are featured in the screen, is reporting that downloads have tripled in the past couple of days since Microsoft started testing the ballot screen.

"Since the browser choice screen rollout, Opera downloads have more than tripled in major European countries, such as Belgium, France, Spain, Poland and the UK," Rolf Assev, Opera's chief strategy officer, told Reuters.

Opera has just released the latest version of its browser for Windows, Opera 10.50, just one day after the ballot screen started being pushed through Windows Update, on March 2nd, so that has played a role in the surge of downloads. But the company says it's not just the fact that there's a new version out, which usually means an uptake in downloads, the increase is beyond what it normally gets when an update is released and above the number of downloads it saw for Opera 9.5, 10.10 or even Opera 10.

The Windows browser ballot screen was introduced to placate anti-trust concerns from the European Commission (EC). It features the five most popular browsers in the world, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera visibly and another seven smaller browsers if the users scroll to the right.

Other browser makers like Mozilla or Google haven't commented whether they saw the same uptake in downloads like Opera. Firefox is already very popular in Europe, and is the dominant browser in some countries like Germany, so a potential rise in downloads is bound to have a much smaller effect on the overall number of downloads.

Not everyone is happy with the ballot screen, though, as four of the seven secondary browsers have now contacted the EC complaining that the current design of the ballot screen doesn't offer too many indications that there are other options than the primary five, with the only clue being the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom.

Opera 10.50 for Windows is available for download here.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.