Web browsers six months on: the EU’s landmark anti-trust ruling - by Shaun Green

Last December, Microsoft and European Union anti-trust regulators reached a historically significant agreement, following over a decade of disputes and fines valued at approximately £1.5bn. The dispute has its origins in the 1990s, following complaints by Novell and Sun Microsystems, but scaled up in intensity in 2003 and 2004 when the EU ordered Microsoft to offer a version of Windows without their bundled media player. In January 2009, the European Commission announced its plans to investigate the inclusion of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser as bundled software with the Windows Operating System. After some negotiation, Microsoft offered to provide its customers with a selection of different web browsers and, after some deliberation, the EU accepted this.

The industry giant rolled out their browser selection screen in March 2010, offering users a choice of 15 browsers including the popular Firefox, Safari and Chrome, as well as Opera (a recognisable name despite its limited market share). They also included less well-known browsers like Avant, Flock GreenBrowser, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Sleipnir and Slim, which most Windows users had probably not heard of prior to their inclusion here.

So, how has the market share of browsers changed since this initiative was introduced in March 2010? Windows is the most popular operating system in the world, and with the range of options being offered to existing, as well as new users, it would have been easy to predict an explosion in browser diversity.

This hasn’t happened. NetMarketShare, a reliable source of various web statistics and trends, indicates that since late 2009 the dominance of Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped just 5% to 60%. Although this does represent a huge number of users it does not represent a dynamic demographic shift, and in fact seems to represent a trend that has been accelerating since around 2005 (when Firefox began to grow in popularity and IE’s dominance first began deteriorating). Further, the trends indicate that usage of IE first dipped to around 60% in March 2010 and has actually recovered slightly since then – so the introduction of the browser ‘ballot box’ may even have helped stabilise its decline. 

Of IE’s top competitors, Firefox and Opera have actually lost a few percentage points of market share since March; Safari has seen a tiny increase in usage, and only Chrome appears to have enjoyed significant growth, up 1% to just over 7%. However, this reflects a growth trend that long precedes the EU anti-trust ruling. Detailed statistics for less popular browsers aren’t available, but the cumulative figures for all browsers outside ‘the big 5’ have seen an increase of around 0.5%.

What to make of this? One interpretation is that many users are content to stick with the browser they’re most familiar with. Users who were mainly concerned with secure browsing, faster page rendering and unique design had most likely moved on from IE before the introduction of the browser selection tool.

Despite this, the introduction of a range of options is a significant thing, as it opens up the possibility for innovative new browsers to reach new audiences, for dispirited but less computer-savvy users to try something new, and for the curious to experiment with their choice of software. It also reflects the changing times: although IE remains the most popular web browser in the world, its competitors are enjoying success unknown since the early years of ‘browser wars’. Open source developers like the Mozilla Foundation and new super-corporations like Google, may not have wrestled control of the market away from Microsoft, but at present they look determined to share it – and a lack of monopoly is no bad thing for users.