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Reality of Microsoft’s Browser Ballot Screen, Adblock Plus: Best Add-on, Geolocation in Chrome [Browser Saturday]

by | Saturday, 06th Mar 2010 | 1 Comment | Share

The reality of Browser Ballot Screen

Windows 7 Browser Ballot Screen went live for European Union, and as expected Microsoft is not ready to lose the game so easily. Microsoft is tracking user clicks and the algorithm to decide random appearance of browsers is also being criticized.

Now, Download Squad has revealed another fact about Browser ballot screen: 5 out of 7 ‘secondary’ browsers featuring in ballot screen use Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine! A comment posted by richquick in a forum has attracted attention towards this fact. Avant, Green Browser, Maxton, Slim and Sleipnir use the Trident engine, and hence 6 (including IE) out of 12 (i.e.; 50%) browsers provided through the Browser ballot screen are powered by Microsoft technology.

Firefox, Flock and K-Melon run on Gecko, the open source browser rendering engine developed by Mozilla. Moreover, Sleipnir provides an option to switch to Gecko, and Maxthon is planning to support WebKit in future.

Adblock Plus is the Best Open Source Firefox add-on

Firefox add-on Adblock Plus is the most essential tool to browse internet safely. Recently , Adblock Plus has been awarded the Linux Media Award for the best open source Firefox extension. Congratulations to Wladimir Palant! :)

Google Chrome gets Geolocation capabilities

Geolocation in Chrome

Google Chrome dev channel has integrated geolocation APIs. It will help “location-aware” websites to track visitor’s geographical information and serve content accordingly.

Firefox Personas Are Coming To AMO Soon

Mozilla has decide to upgrade Personas by migrating the entire gallery to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Moving to the AMO will integrate Personas with the Firefox ecosystem to a greater extent. Featuring in AMO will enable many existing AMO features with the Personas; like ratings and reviews, usage statistics, designer profiles for developers, support for more languages, tagging and searching etc.

Mozilla is also planning to add more new features to the Personas, like:

  • Theme capability
  • Dynamic Personas
  • Personas for subwindows
  • Self hosted Personas, similar to recently introduced “Self hosted Add-ons”
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Arpit is a full time devotee of Tech and Web 2.0

Arpit Kumar has written

The author of this post can be contacted at arpit@techie-buzz.com

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  1. oli-uk on November 12th, 2010 at 3:40 pm #

    The browser ballot is a good idea but IE is probably dying anyway

    Much, much, more important are Microsofts licensing practices which ensure that PC manufacturers pay for windows even if they want to install another OS

    A PC with Linux installed should be cheaper for the manufacturer and the customer but MS have carefully arranged licensing to ensure this doesn’t happen

    I hope the EU will address this much more important anti-competitive arrangement