Coding Error Leads to Uneven EU browser Ballot Distribution
Internet Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the time when the ballot was viewed from within IE
The Windows Browser Ballot, the browser selection screen that is
being offered to Windows users in Europe starting this month, is already
coming under fire. Slovakian IT news site DSL.sk decided to test the
ballot and found that its distribution was very peculiar, with Internet
Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the
time when the ballot was viewed from within IE.
Notable ODF proponent and IBM employee Rob Weir took a closer look at the ballot to determine why it was acting in this way. It turns out that the problem is more likely than not a bad programming decision rather than some deliberate ploy by Microsoft to pick a particular spot.
The browser ballot is split into two parts; the opening screen of the five most common Windows browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera), and then on scrolling to the right, a further seven browsers. Each section—first five, and the remaining seven—is supposed to be randomized, so that the browsers within that section can appear in any order. This randomization is done client-side, using JavaScript in the web page.
What DSL.sk noticed, and Rob Weir confirmed, is that the distribution is not uniform. That is to say, different browsers have different probabilities of landing in a particular position. Chrome was more likely to occupy one of the first three slots than any other browser, and IE had a better than 50 percent chance of being in the fifth slot. Different browsers produced different results; DSL.sk's testing used Internet Explorer, and Rob Weir found Firefox also gave a nonunform distribution. A different distribution from Internet Explorer, but nonuniform all the same.
Technically, the decision only requires randomness, not a uniform distribution (that is, one in which each browser has the same likelihood of being placed in any given spot), but given that the European Commission rejected previous suggestions such as a fixed display order, it is likely that a uniform distribution is the one that was intended.
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