

Firefox: browser ballot glitch cost us 9m downloads - neya
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/377878/firefox-browser-ballot-glitch-cost-us-9m-downloads

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Argorak
I am quite surprised that this "glitch" ever happened. I am usually no friend
of conspiracy theories, but I find the following coincidence a bit tasty:

* Microsoft is known for its obsession with rigorous testing.

* They had to pay around a billion for anticompetitive behaviour _and_ implement the "browser ballot". Failure to comply would cost them up to 10% of the annual turnover.

* There was a "glitch" that deactivated the ballot for 15 (!) months for a full service pack.

~~~
powertower
Do you really think that Microsoft would...

1) Pretend that no one would notice.

2) Do a risk to reward analysis, where they would gladly pay out 7 billion
dollars if caught (over a few million extra IE installs).

3) Implement a fix within one day after notice, and offer to extend this
ballot on their brand new OS for another 15 months.

The simpler explanation is that due to the nature of the ballot, their test
Suite did not include the browser ballot in it, and was delegated to someone
in the legal department that filed if away and forgot about it.

This ONLY affected 28 million PCs. That's a very small fraction of the user-
base. And considering IE's market share, this bug would have only caused less
than 1/2 of that number of non-installs of other-browsers... As afterwards,
anyone could have just downloaded what they were looking for anyways.

 _Also note that for 15 months NO ONE (well, just a few people apparently)
contacted MS or the EU Commission about not seeing the browser ballot._ I
guess the browser ballot is as important as you might think it is to the
people of EU.

~~~
Argorak
I didn't say that they did it on purpose. My point is that this is incredibly
stupid, especially for an organisation of that size and the projected fine.
Yes, we usually don't test for edge cases, but the 7 billion edge-case? So how
was this allowed happen?

Also, I don't think that this was not reported for 15 months. The problem only
became widely known after the EU actually decided for a formal investigation.
I found no coverage about when the problem was reported.

The 28 million-number is rather irrelevant, as the news coverage states that
all of windows 7 SP 1 was affected, so they failed at a major release level.
It wasn't 2% of the release or something. This could even have been cought by
manual testing.

I don't care how important the ballot is in the real world (for the record: I
hate the ruling). But this is one of the biggest companies in the world
failing to comply with a pretty clear rule that came out of the most expensive
ruling ever dropped on them.

~~~
powertower
My fault. I completely misread your comment.

~~~
Argorak
My fault as well, I didn't make clear that I did not actually believe that,
but that the coincidence really lends itself to one.

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abhimishra
The article's headline is inaccurate. From Harvey Anderson's blog post
([http://lockshot.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/windows-eu-
ballot-s...](http://lockshot.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/windows-eu-ballot-
screen-technical-glitch/)): "Cumulatively 6 to 9 million Firefox browser
downloads were lost during this period."

~~~
freehunter
The graph on lockshot shows 8.7m. I assume the author of the pcpro article
just rounded up. I'm not saying the author _should_ have rounded up, because
she shouldn't have. Journalists should strive for accuracy in paraphrasing the
words of their subject. I wouldn't necessarily call it inaccurate though,
since it falls within what Harvey estimates as well. I'd rather call it
slightly overzealous reporting.

~~~
shardling
Rounding from 8.7 to 9 is perfectly acceptable, especially with something
that's an estimate to begin with.

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powertower
Why does that graph show world-wide downloads? Shouldn't it instead show EU
downloads only to give an accurate account of the effects of the glitch?

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Karunamon
It took 15 months for this to come to light?

A more cynical person might say this proves the silliness of the whole
"browser ballot" concept.

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freakyterrorist
I can't help but question whether some of the higher download volume in 2012
was due to the new rapid release cycle rather than the browser ballot being
implemented.

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DigitalSea
Fair enough this will no doubt prove to be a costly mistake for Microsoft, but
I seriously doubt the drop in Firefox downloads is due to Microsoft not
implementing the browser ballot and most likely due to the fact that Chrome is
a better browser and Firefox were slow to address plugin memory leak issues
(which they only just recently fixed).

~~~
DigitalSea
Why the downvotes?

