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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The One With Microsoft Paying Users

You probably do not know what's happened today at about UTC lunch time. It has been just a quick twit from John Resig, that at least every follower instantly noticed the next Microsoft campaign pro Internet Explorer 8.

The Fact

Microsoft Australia launched a sort of "competition", called Ten Grand. Apparently, starting from Friday 19th, a twit will be released each N hours, creating a sort of one day investigation to discover where the price is (in my opinion somewhere in the same page where the contest begins, assumption created by my idea about M$ "fantasy").

The Problem

That Web Page literally insults other web browsers, even discarding, probably on purpose, Opera one. In few words, that game is only for Internet Explorer 8 Users. OK, OK, they are apparently desperate enough to pay users in order to have more market share, fair enough, but what is all this "fun" about others?

  • You'll never find it using old Firefox

  • You'll never find it using boring Safari

  • You'll never find it using tarnished Chrome



The Old Firefox

Growing up, day after day and biting points to IE market share, Firefox has always been an advanced browser, specially compared with Internet Explorer. Easy for everyone, powerful for developers, Firefox supports, for example, still in draft HTML 5 elements and W3 standards ... since ages!
Internet Explorer 7 by the time was still suffering standards events, CSS 2 problems, and slow general responsiveness, over missed possibility for developers to debug properly. From Firefox, Internet Explorer 8 tried to copy a wonderful tool, Firebug, without having sames possibilities. Internet Explorer 8, compared with Firefox, has still W3 standards compatibility problems, a 5 times slower JavaScript engine, and lack of plug-ins to develop or simply surf more free.

The Boring Safari

When you catalog a browser with such adjective, boring, it means you do not have arguments at all and you have been swallowed in the kiddish gne, gne, gne twister unable to admit that "the boring one", is 2 laps around the world in front of you. The pioneer of CSS 3 transitions, effects, text properties, animations, one of the first to implement via WebKit guys (Gosh, I forgot to test WebKit there!!!) the new Squirrel Fish Engine, now Extreme in Safari 4, which is about 20 times faster than Internet Explorer ... but I forgot, boring is Safari because I guess boring is Mac OSX right? The Operating System famous for its native fluid user friendly special effects? Tha company that made iPhone, iPod, iWhatever, a must for everyone? Ooooohhhh Yes, that's boring!

The Tarnished Chrome

... wait a second, it's probably me .... let me think ... "tarnished Chrome ... rome ... ome ... om". To be honest, when I read that, I though the creator of this Chrome dedicated version smoked a truly powerful drug, one of those drugs they write: use carefully in open spaces to avoid poisoning, but he rolled up the chemical stuff and that's the slogan: Avoid The Tarnished Chrome (The One With All Colorful Logo, Right?)
I am sure this is the adjective about Google in Microsoft corridors, but still, only assumption. A browser that in few months is already between the third and the fourth position, rich of plugins, innovative ideas, is open source and again, it has a proper JavaScript engine, the V8 one, able to destroy in performance all Internet Explorers togheter!
Which part is tarnished? Google is a "neverendingmoving" company, which rather than block Web Development for at least 5 years is putting effort every day to make the Web a better, evoluted place (Silverlight possibly excluded, personal opinion).

The Smell Of 90s Competition Page

Seriously, a competition which aim is to ask people to use Internet Explorer, rather than a website created only for Internet Explorer with, for example, @font-face instead of those old style images over hidden text ... I mean, what the hell is that, a web page? I think all bad practices found a single page to be presented. Bad quality png, maybe this is for IE6, disproportionate use of images to make the page size about 140Kb, insults that only old IE8 users will appreciate for Who knows which reason (wake up guys), and a logic, a server side control, SO EFFICIENT, that simply using a userAgent switcher Firefox plugin I was able to emulate IE8 without receiving insults. Is this what you are looking for, a winner with Firebug, a plug-in to emulate Internet Explorer 8? What will happen if for some reason the winner will not use IE8? I am the author of vice-versa, for example, even emulate IE8 JScript is not a problem, with a more powerful browser, isn't it?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Webkit gives the same message as Safari. But you probably figured that out already :)

PhiSYS said...

Yesterday I commented with my partner that M$ is desperate paying users to switch to IE8 instead a better browser, mainly because of all these no-IE6 campaigns around, and the rising of IE6 incompatible sites asking to use a newer browser.

RStankov said...

If this isn't enough I spotted this today - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx
Witch is really funny especially - Security, Web Standards, Developer Tools, Performance

Andrea Giammarchi said...

Jack, Microsoft started IE8 advertisement with a nonsense video that I cannot find right now. It was about loading performances, bulling IE8 against 0.1 seconds, and blaming Firefox when it was 0.1 seconds slower. It is quite obvious Microsoft understood too late how much the Web is important, rather than categorize it as a quick deadline for every business. A too powerful browser a la Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Opera, could simply make an Operating System something Jurassic. We do not need hard disk aymore, there are online file storage services. We do not need the desktop anymore, there are online desktop like application. We do not need Office Suite, there are online Office like application, with native run-time share privileges. All this stuff is something Microsoft should have been pioneer, as it was with Windows 95, but nothing to do, even if we use 90% of our hardware to surf the net, people complain about pre-installed Linux, claiming good "old" XP in their Netbook. In my opinion, Microsoft has been the most looking forward company, and at the same time, the most conservative one. C# and .NET stuff are part of the looking forward branch, everything else, starting from unappreciated Operating System a la Vista, are part of the old internal M$ administration area, people grew with an OS, and for this reason, against OS like on-line services. The only true thing, in my opinion, is that M$ is somehow changing, IE8 is the proof. At the same time, M$ marketing and advertisement companies are probably the same, so all they can do is to blame other without concrete numbers to make their image still that good, as it was 10 years ago. I admire Google for its innovation and effort, Mozilla, for its internal revolution, Apple for its marketing and Opera, at least for its effort. I dream a world without Internet Explorer anymore, so that people will finally understand that they have done wrong all these years (their IT Manager as well, regardless to M$ servers or programming languages, those are OK, IE is NOT, compared to others). So, as summary, what can I say, the fact they are putting prices blaming other browsers talks by it self ... M$ and the Web are too distant from each other, once too focused on licences that are inevitable falling down, price speaking, and IE8, with so few changes that a 1st year uni student could ave implemented, like global JSON, which does not even recognize a fake Date object from a normal one (new Date(NaN)). That's all folks, the problem is that "not that interested people", cannot even decide to opt for another browser, and banks are paying minimum 50.000 pounds a year System Administrators unable to face the reality. Still my opinion, take it carefully.

Anonymous said...

"The One With Microsoft Paying Users" What, again? Laureeeeeeen! Get over here! Quick! Quick!