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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, March 12, 2010

You'll never forget you have a choice

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I ran Windows Update on one of my PCs this morning and when it rebooted I found something that in all probability many of you have seen too; a pop-up window that says, “An important choice to make: your browser” and gives you a link to click that takes you to a screen explaining that there are lots of choices of browser.

The first screen immediately arouses suspicion because it doesn’t say who created it, and it just gives you an unsigned link to click – often a very bad idea.

In fact, it’s from Microsoft and it’s basically a bit of EU idiocy; it’s part of the settlement reached between MS and the EU in the Case of the Bundled Browsers. As always, every civil servant and every politician in the EU structure assumes that everyone else in the entire 300-million of us are so stupid we don’t know that many alternatives to Internet Explorer exist, and that they come from different suppliers. Which is, presumably why they have insisted that the opening screen is anonymous. Which, in turn, gets the paranoid among us reaching for the virus-killer.

In fact, even if you ignore the unsigned link and try to kill the opening screen, you get the same second screen anyway!

Fortunately, it’s very easy to make it go away; run msconfig and untick “browserchoice” which you'll find has inserted itself on to the startup programs list.

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