Congratulations on IE10: from Mozilla with cake | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on IE10: from Mozilla with cake

limpet.net

246 pointsmbrubeck51 comments

  > Back when Firefox 2 was released (six years ago this week!), 
  > the Internet Explorer team started a friendly tradition of sending Mozilla a cake
  > as congratulations. This continued for Firefox 3 and Firefox 4.

This finally explains why they changed to the more frequent release schedule.

And in response the ie team switched to sending them a cupcake per release.

Then a doughnut, eclair, fro yo, gingerbread, honeycomb, ice cream sandwich, and some jelly beans?

Wait, that's some other project.

of some different company.

You know what is so amazing about this tradition? It is not about the software or the companies that build them, it is about people sharing their 'love' and respect for each other citing the software as a reason. I simply love this. I think even we should team up and send pg, and his new YC teams a cake every year (without expecting a cake in return :P ) :)

I would imagine that these two teams, and the Chrome team, are the only people who fully understand what supporting an application as complex as a Web browser entails. And the IE10 team are now dealing with different architectures (arm and x86?).

Opera?

Oh, yes, how could I forget Opera, cross platform, cross architecture, mobile and PCs. Perhaps it is hard to get cakes to Oslo?

Hell it even runs on TVs!

I love this browser it ran flawlessly on almost anything, and when it comes to cake Opera is hard to beat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_cake

IE has dealt with different architectures since its very beginning, as has Windows. Recall that Windows so far ran on x86, x86-64, IA64, DEC Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and ARM (and I probably forgot a few). Also they re-used the Trident Engine whenever they needed a browser on another device, so ARM isn't exactly new to them (Windows Phone) or even other platforms (XBox 360 is PowerPC).

Dont forget IE4 (iirc) that ran on sparc solaris.

Safari? It runs on OS X, Windows and iOS. So arm and x86.

Yes, Webkit is widely used on Linux as well as in Chrome...

Firefox also runs on ARM Android devices. So it's not just IE10 that runs on multiple architectures.

Sure does, I was welcoming the Microsoft team to the world of multiple processor types! I think there is still a PPC build of Firefox for Linux as well...

I for one love that there's decent competition right now, and not just IE or Netscape. It puzzles me when people are so divisive about iOS, Android, Windows RT, etc. when we have more viable alternatives than we used to. (though we could still use more)

This continued good-natured back-and-forth is nice to see. Kind of reminds me of something Stephen Potter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Potter) would have done, had he been in the tech industry :)

Major tech organizations being friendly with each other? Unthinkable! We must put a stop to this madness before it spreads to to other tech companies and humanity in general!

But don't fear, we always have Apple v. Google, Microsoft v. Apple, Samsung v. Apple and a whole host of others to remind us of how we should behave.

In 1930 he wrote D. H. Lawrence: A First Study, the first book-length work on Lawrence, which appeared in print within a few days of the death of its subject, unfortunate timing because it seemed like an inadequate memorial rather than what it was intended to be, a critical reappraisal. It also suffered from a regrettable misprint, rendering the heading "Sea and Sardinia", as "Sex and Sardinia". This was soon amplified by rumour into "Sex and Sardines", none of which helped Potter's reputation as a serious writer.

Poor bastard.

Like CIA and KGB agents in hot remote countries, the opposing camps turn out to have far more in common with each other than their "motherlands"

> "As you can see from their picture, the bottom border of the cake was slightly restyled in transit"

They should have doubled the padding to be safe.

It demonstrated the inherit problems with the box model (of delivery).

The padding looks large enough to me; they should have added a bit of margin.

  > Just 30 minutes later, Michael Bolan tweeted that the cake was gone.

This has me thinking of that scene in Mike Judge's Office Space where Milton always happens to be in the wrong part of the crowd relative to the cake and never gets a piece. Cruel but hilarious.

I don't know how many people there are in that office, but I hope it's sufficiently few that no-one got Miltoned :).

Does IE copy parts of code from Firefox? [Honest question.]

Guess you will never know (read: closed source) ;)

The licensing means that MS would have to disclose whether or not they did. Since they haven't, and since MS are good at that kind of thing, we can say that IE does not include Firefox code.

When Windows had some BSD code the EULA was clear.

(Not sure why your straight forward question got downvoted.)

Absolutely no cake love for Safari?

I think Apple can afford its own cake.

Or at least to put their own icing on KHTML's cake.

Sending a cake to yourself and getting excited about it is the lamest situation I could ever imagine of.

The reality distortion field works on anything - even on making them get excited about their own cake. I'm just kidding, of course. No, not really.

I don't know: it might be a very nice cake.

Cake generally excites me, regardless of the source.

What about a cake of soap?

...and then some.

There was a plan to ship one, but there weren't any without rounded corners at the bakery, and they didn't want to risk a lawsuit.

Also, a white icing finish would infringe on Apple's registered design for the iPad 2.

It gave me warm fuzzy feelings to see two members of the IE team with Firefox sweaters ! That's what you can call healthy competition i guess.

I think they were the two members of the Mozilla team that delivered the cake to their IE friends. (Matt Brubek and Eitan Isaacson).

Yes -- that's me on the left and Eitan on the right in the Firefox hoodies. (I updated the post to mention this in a caption.)

Let's talk, let's be friends, let's make the web a better place for everyone. No War!

Are there like "icing printers" now or is that done by hand?

The icing is done by hand. You can buy stencils for the lettering.

I guess an SVG of the logo can be used as a template to cut out paste.

But you raise a good idea: 3d printing of sugar "stuff" to print messages for cakes on demand, in any font.

Printed edible sheets to put on cakes already exist.

Maybe you can use 3D printers to make "impossible" cakes like crystal structures (ie. Dr. Manhattan on Mars)

Well, at least there's CandyFab [1] which literally 3D-prints sugar. In its current incarnation even edibly so.

[1] http://www.candyfab.org/

There are bakeries that can decorate cake using inkjet or screen-printing machines (with edible dyes, of course) but the logo on this cake was hand-painted.

Shouldn't they.... hate each other?

Of course they're competitors (although the Mozilla party line is "competition is better for everyone"), but I think the takeaway here is the mutual respect they have for each other. Building a browser is hard. And building a good browser (which IE 10 is, by the way) is a major endeavor. So I think each team has a pretty good idea of the level of achievement that comes with finally shipping.

Also the rivalry is often more at the level of the company above them and not the individual developers.

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