Microsoft no longer displays the system browser selection dialog when installing Windows

In 2009, Microsoft, following the requirements of European Union regulators, who began the trial of Internet Explorer’s dominance on the market with the Opera filing, agreed immediately after installing the new Windows 7 operating system to offer users in the EU a choice of browser that could be downloaded to replace the standard IE . The term of the prescription was five years.

At first, Redmond suggested this solution: when Windows was first launched, it was suggested in a special window to select a browser for downloading, whose names were arranged in alphabetical order. Obviously, such a decision was very useful for Apple Safari, but representatives of Google, Opera and Mozilla opposed and insisted that the list of browsers be formed in a random order, with which the regulators agreed.

In 2009, the share of full-time Internet Explorer was 70%, but after five years past, its share has significantly decreased, and to a large extent due to powerful competitors - Google Chrome occupies about half of the market, and the share of Firefox is about 20%. Thus, about 30% of IE’s audience is hardly a danger to competitors.
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Since the European Union's five-year prescription expired, Microsoft issued a guide for system administrators to edit the registry, where it notifies that the Browser Choice window will no longer appear.

It is difficult to judge whether the EU measures proved to be effective for the fall of the share of IE by more than two times, but in the first eight months 84 million copies of alternative browsers were downloaded. At the same time, in March 2013, Microsoft paid a fine of 561 million euros for “forgetting” to include the selection window in the first Windows 7 service pack and for 14 months Internet Explorer was again the only option for the first couple of minutes of work in the system.