The Advertising Standards Authority has thrown out a complaint against Microsoft over publicity it ran for its Internet Explorer 8 web browser.
The complaint – brought by advertising company Crispin Porter Bogusky – claimed that saying IE8 was “the most widely used browser” was misleading and could not be substantiated.
The advert was run online between May and July this year and the complaint alleged that Firefox had a greater market share than IE8.
While the claim might be true under one interpretation of selected market share figures, Microsoft argued that the figures provided didn’t reflect the market, and the adjudicating panel agreed.
According to Microsoft, the complaint compared market data for IE8 against all versions of Firefox, not just the latest.
“The complainant’s argument that Mozilla Firefox had a greater percentage share of the market than IE8 depended on comparing market share data for the IE8 version of Explorer, with a median statistical share from various sources for all versions of Firefox, including historical versions,” the regulator said in its ruling.
“We considered that was not a valid comparison, because the two things being compared were not equal.”
Microsoft also pointed to statistics that the Firefox version with the greatest market share was Firefox 3.6, at 15.67% in May 2010, compared to IE8’s 25.18% share.
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