Google wants special treatment in IE

Google wants special treatment in IE

His remarks centered on the default search engine in the Web browser. Right now, when people update their version of IE, the software won’t change their default search settings. “If you pick Yahoo, it will stay on Yahoo,” Ballmer said in a hallway conversation Thursday, after a speech he gave at the Churchill Club here.

Google, however, has complained about how the system works. The complaints could be taken as a disguised way to help that company grow its segment in search, Ballmer suggested.

“Google wants us to prompt the users to change the defaults. They want to see a list of search providers, with the No. 1 search provider listed first,” said Ballmer

Let me just say this, I completely agree with what Steve Balmer is saying. Google is attempting to complain that Microsoft is using it’s internet browser to promote it’s search engine. If you re-read the quote you may understand my problem with this whining. What percentage of users of Internet Explorer 7 will be upgrading? I would say roughly 95% of all users that will be installing IE7 will be existing IE6 users. This being said, when you upgrade it will not touch your default search engine. So that being said, 95% of users will not have to choose anything or change anything when it comes to there search engine of choice. My question is this, Firefox defaults to Google which using Google’s current argument should pop up a window prompting the user to pick which search engine to use upon installation. According to Google’s logic Microsoft should have to prompt users to decide on there default search engine upon installing IE7. This would consist of a list of search engines likely (if Google has it’s way) ordered by market prevalence (i.e. Google at the top of the list). I think it’s pathetic and ridiculous that Google is trying to use this sad argument to prevent a competitor from possibly gaining ground. I think whomever views this complaint will throw it out simply based on the fact that the default search engine will remain untouched for all upgrading users. We shall see.