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Comment by trezor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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