Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection

Rob Weir got wind that a Slovakian tech site had been discussing the non-randomness of Microsoft's intended-to-be-random browser choice screen, which went into effect on European Windows 7 systems last week. He did some testing and found that indeed the order in which the five browser choices appear on the selection screen is far from random mdash; though probably not intentionally slanted. He then proceeds to give Microsoft a lesson in random-shuffle algorithms. "This computational problem has been known since the earliest days of computing. There are 5 well-known approaches: 3 good solutions, 1 acceptable solution that is slower than necessary and 1 bad approach that doesnrsquo;t really work. Microsoft appears to have picked the bad approach. But I do not believe there is some nefarious intent to this bug. It is more in the nature of a 'naive algorithm,' like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least 1 of them would make the same mistake. But with education and experience, one learns about these things. And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth. ... The lesson here is that getting randomness on a computer cannot be left to chance. You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results."pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/02/28/1837223/Schooling-Microsoft-On-Random-Browser-Selection?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/02/28/1837223"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F02%2F28%2F1837223%2FSchooling-Microsoft-On-Random-Browser-Selection" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Schooling+Microsoft+On+Random+Browser+ Selection%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FamwuZJ" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/02/28/1837223/Schooling-Microsoft-On-Random-Browser-Selection?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Llj4BJeZ9BUupNOmnJDOZtMbee8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Llj4BJeZ9BUupNOmnJDOZtMbee8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Llj4BJeZ9BUupNOmnJDOZtMbee8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Llj4BJeZ9BUupNOmnJDOZtMbee8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/HNcmMLoaaGw" height="1" width="1"/

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