From the
‘
European Lifestyle Choices‘
files:
After a whole lot of negotiations, Microsoft is now set to offer European users of its Windows operating system with a browser choice.
My colleague Stuart Johnston reported for InternetNews.com that there will soon be a “choice screen” on Windows PCs sold within the European Economic Area that lets
users choose which of a dozen or so browsers they would like to set as
their default.
Why don’t U.S. consumers get the same choice?
Yes I know full well that any user can go and download Safari, Firefox, Chrome or Opera for Windows.
I also know that for a whole lot of people out there, who just don’t know any better the big blue E is the Internet and that’s all there is to it.
In my own personal experience, I was recently at a relative’s house and they asked me to look at their PC. The problemthey thought they had was that the Internet wasn’t working. I checked out their router connection, did an ipconfig lookup and everything was fun. The problem was that they had lost their IE (big blue E) shortcut somehow, so they didn’t know how to get on the Internet.
That’s why browser choice, at the install level of a PC is so critical.