Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 at the height of cynicism | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 at the height of cynicism

factoryjoe.com

39 pointsangelod10125 comments

Also, turns out one of Microsoft's updates to IE8 actually breaks this contest from working: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090617/internet-explorer-... I can't reiterate enough how absolutely hilarious that is.

Plus, after the update broke IE8, they tried to fix it and failed: "It appears the Compatibility View list cannot be overridden."

If the press does its job, this whole thing will be a net loss for Microsoft.

So the author is complaining that Microsoft is restricting a contest designed to get users to download IE8 to, uh, users of IE8?

If they _didn't_ do that, why would they run a contest at all? Would having a Firefox user win the contest justify the marketing expense?

I agree that the promo is pretty thoughtless, but I'm not sure there was any thought put into this criticism either.

We need someone to win the contest using Firefox (changing their user agent) and just viewing source when appropriate (to avoid IE "compatibility" bugs that hide things).

Or better, can someone quickly release an FF extension which can beat this? That would be an interesting counter strike :)

"It's not as stupid as it sounds." - Lol.

IE8 isn't that bad. Sure it's slow, but most everything you'd need is implemented. I don't like the haughty tone of the contest, but meh. Firefox fans have run similar campaigns, e.g. http://wedontsupportie.com/

That was in reference to IE6 which was a pain in the ass to support and required a site to be written with tons of exceptions.

To be fair they encourage people to upgrade from MSIE 6 and 7 too, and if they can achieve that, I'm willing to consider that a good thing.

And to be be fairer, they're not encouraging others to go out and built IE-only sites. They've just designed this site (presumable through a simple JS browser check or UA check on the server side) to only allow entry via IE8.

But still, kind of a dick move. The whole "get lost" message isn't really a good marketing move either.

How can they call FireFox 'old'? IE8 may be the best IE, but it's still a year or more behind the other browsers, and FF is very actively being developed. 3.5RC1 just came out in the past 24 hours.

I wonder if they are checking the firefox version number. For me on Firefox 3.0, it just says "you'll never find it with that browser".

I wonder if they are checking the firefox version number

I guess not. I use FF 3.0.x and they said "old Fire Fox". It looks like many people are actually downloading IE8 to participate in this. Hopefully, this actually may not change the market share of IE vis-a-vis its competitors. If you are an FF user, even if you download IE8 and participate in this contest, you are most likely to stick to FF. IOW I'm hoping that the downloads won't actually translate to conversions from other browsers. One good thing that might come out of this is some IE6 upgrades to IE8.

"First, my memory isn’t so short as to have forgotten that it was Microsoft and their browser (Internet Explorer 6) that held back the web for so many years."

That's bullshit. IE6 may have sucked, but it didn't hold anything back. As Firefox proved, anyone could have come along and built a better browser and started sucking up enough market share to make it an industry again.

What are you talking about? They couldn't be bothered to update IE6 for years, and it still holds people back every day. How much time is wasted trying to get things to work in IE6? It's a ball an chain that web developers drag around and it slows progress by wasting their time and limiting their applications. Only recently have some websites been dropping support for IE6.

And so comes the totally unbiased voice of an ms fanboy ;)

Seriously. They employed anti competitive practices to grab market share from Netscape. Once they had completely obliterated Netscape, they decided to not update IE6 and leave users suffering.

It's like their aim with IE6 was to kill off the web. Or at least make it suck so much that webapps would be delayed for 10 years - which they pretty much achieved. Obviously that was in ms's favor - their business is desktop apps, not webapps.

I dislike IE6 as much as the next guy (more probably), but people should stop harping on Microsoft like this.

IE6 created the first version of AJAX. It had browser based drawing primitives ages before anyone else. It turns out that IE filters were capable of CSS transforms all this time and nobody even realized it. IE6 was innovative when it was released, at a time when the competition was simply inferior.

It's unfortunate that it took Microsoft so long to release IE7, and it certainly has caused significant pain, but realize that it's not as black and white as people make it out to be.

Their goal with IE _was_ to sabotage any serious effort into turning the web (as a OS-neutral entity defined by w3c standards) into an application-delivery platform. That's why they spent so much effort into obliterating Netscape, into fragmenting Java on the desktop and into preventing OEMs from installing any other browser on their hardware.

And they sort of succeeded. And that's why they have so much trouble on Europe.

I haven't used any version of IE (other than for testing, or where sites require it) since the first time I tried out Firefox, which I think was called Phoenix back when I started. But the issue I have with that logic is that nothing ever changed with their so-called "anti-competitive practices", and yet the browser market did drastically when Firefox started picking up steam. IE kept on being bundled with every Windows install. The market worked itself out.

If IE6 were holding it back for so long, why did it miraculously stop, even though nothing changed? The answer, of course, is that it wasn't IE6. It was the lack of a business model, which was inadvertently solved by Google.

Saying IE6 held the browser market back is like saying Yahoo held the search market back by giving it away for free. Just like Yahoo, Microsoft is now feeling the pain of failure to innovate.

Of course, everyone here hates IE6 (understandably) and Microsoft so I'll get downmodded a lot.

  >> If IE6 were holding it back for so long, why did it
  >> miraculously stop, even though nothing changed? The
  >> answer, of course, is that it wasn't IE6. It was the lack
  >> of a business model, which was inadvertently solved by
  >> Google.

I think one reason was that Netscape had got so big and unwieldy that users didn't see a compelling case to switch from IE once MS forced them into using it. Firefox changed all that with innovative features, and a quick easy browsing experience - credit where credit's due.

I don't think the business model really matters TBH. Firefox would have happened without google.

Maybe you have a point though, maybe people could have tried harder, and "Done a firefox" earlier, and still been able to gain market share. I don't know when all the legal stuff against Microsofts anti-competitive business practices started to get stamped out, but it seemed to be around the same time of phoenix/firefox.

It is important to note that IE6 didn't suck at first relative to its competition. It just didn't improve while the rest of the web did at the speed of light. I know it's hard to remember that when you're trying to find workarounds for lack of png transparency or figure out why your divs aren't where they should be.

Firefox clearly started happening before they found such a great way to monetize, but I have a hard time believing it would be what it is today with tens of millions of dollars less coming in. Now there's so much money in it that there are multiple decent competitors to IE.

All of Microsoft's settlements seem to have had no impact on their browser strategy really. Every copy of Windows still has IE on it, just like it did before, and requires a download of Firefox or any other competitor. I don't think their "anti-competitive practices" or the cessation thereof have made any difference at all. Hence my original post.

In Europe, Microsoft will not be selling any version of Windows 7 that includes IE. See http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2009...

As far as I remember, MS made sure that no OEM was able to ship a PC with any other browser installed. Or at least made it not in their interest to try to.

The answer, of course, is that it wasn't IE6. It was the lack of a business model...

As I recall, Netscape had a business model back before Microsoft set out to use monopoly power to deliberately destroy it.

Your argument reminds me of the old joke about the guy who kills his parents and then runs around asking for sympathy because he's an orphan.

Of course, it's quite possible that Netscape's original business model was nonviable. There were plenty of silly business models around in the old days. We'll never really know. But this doesn't let Microsoft off the hook: Shooting someone who has a terminal illness is still murder.

From the latest Joel on Software post: "Dave Winer (in 2007): 'Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.'"

That's Netscape. They had a nonviable business model in charging for something that ended up on the roadmap of every platform they were on. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but Apple bundles a browser with their OS for free too, and would have done the same if they owned the market. And then everyone would be complaining that Safari held us all back.

Firefox found a viable business model and the browser wars began again. That's all there is to it.

I agree. It was not IE6 that held us back. It was Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour and OEM ties that precluded OEMs from installing anything but Microsoft browsers. IE was only a part in this grand strategy.

Their grip was so strong they rescued Apple and made it bundle IE in MacOS.

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