Microsoft Session at Cloud Expo

Microsoft only started distributing its newfangled Ballot Screen last week to give Europeans an antitrust-correcting choice of browsers when Opera claimed it was already seeing a tripling of its downloads in western Europe and Poland because of the thing and then Mozilla told the New York Times over the weekend that Firefox was up 50,000+ because of it.

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However, Opera and Firefox, like IE, Chrome and Safari, are clearly visible on the screen. To see the half-dozen little-know choices the user has to scroll sideways and Avant, Flock, Green, Maxthon, Slim and Sleipnir have now complained to the European Commission about their second-class share of the real estate.

The Ballot Screen's random shuffling of the order of the top five browsers became an issue after a Slovakian tech site ran some hypothetical tests and figured the pot wasn't stirred enough, giving Chrome an edge.

Microsoft has since tweaked its algorithm.

See http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/03/new-microsoft-shuffle.html for an exhausting, er, exhaustive discussion of the situation.