The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), due out next year, will impose new rules on several tech giants, including providing users with browser selection screens to choose default options. That sounds great, but Mozilla warns that these screens must be designed to promote all products equally, not just those from a particular vendor.
In September this year, the European Commission named six gatekeepers within the DMA's remit: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. The three major operating systems covered by these companies - Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows - must provide users with a browser selection interface starting next year.
Mozilla released a report last week highlighting the importance of these screen designs.
"Operating systems have the ability and incentive to push users towards their own products - this is nothing new. We have found that even small changes can affect the effectiveness of the browser's chosen remedies," the Firefox browser maker wrote.
Such subtle manipulations are known as darkpatterns: a way of designing interfaces to confuse users or trick them into accepting or choosing something.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Epic Games $245 million for using clever interface design to trick Fortnite players into making unintended in-game purchases. Recently, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, accusing it of using this technology to force users to sign up for Prime membership and then making it difficult for users to cancel their subscriptions.
In Mozilla's experiment, 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland were recruited. Some of them didn't see the selection screen and their default browser was preset. The remaining participants saw a random selection screen that varied in three aspects: the amount of information provided, the number of browsers, and the time the selection screen was displayed.
Mozilla discovered five major revelations:
1. Providing more information and a wider range of browsers on these screens affects user choice, increasing people's satisfaction and the number of times they choose a standalone browser. The display order of browsers can also have a big impact on selection.
2. The exact timing of the screen is an important factor because people who see the screen after clicking on a pre-installed browser select it more often than people who are given the choice during setup.
3. Most people prefer to have a lot of information about each browser on these screens, such as description, star rating, and number of reviews.
4. Selection screens increase satisfaction – 98% of people prefer having a selection screen without significantly increasing the time it takes to set up their device.
5. Most importantly, a well-designed browser selection interface allows users to no longer use the operating system manufacturer/device manufacturer's browser, thereby increasing the share of independent browsers.
Mozilla noted that in the past when companies were told to include browser selection interfaces, they designed them in ways that made them less effective. "For example, the effect of Google's 2019 browser selection screen has proven to be negligible," the report explains.
Mozilla said it looks forward to engaging with regulators and other entities to discuss its experiments and explore the results.