The 11% for IE11 challenge | Hacker News Reader

The 11% for IE11 challenge

blogs.windows.com

57 pointslanthe50 comments

The blog and the 11% for IE11 landing page both imply that if you complete the challenge, you will win the prizes described.

For instance, the blog entry says: "If you can get 11% better page load performance from your site, we'll send you and your team some 11 goodness." I'm no lawyer, but that sounds like a valid unilateral contract to me.

Similarly, the landing page says: "Show us how you got 11% better page load performance in your organization's home web page and we'll send you all this goodness."

But in the fine print, it says: "The first 11 organizations that meet the qualifications above will each receive the following: 11 pizzas (in the form of a $120 gift card), 11 year-long subscriptions to BrowserStack (ARV $240 each), and 11 copies of Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac (ARV $79 each)."

There's a heck of a big difference between "If you do this, we'll give you this" and "If you're one of the first 11 people to do this, we'll give you this."

The fact that there will be only 11 prize winners should be made more clear. After all, there is PIZZA on the line. And there's nothing like a pizza bait-and-switch to get developers angry at you.

Well now I just feel cheated. How do I un-vote up a story?

You can flag it.

@jawns. We have updated the blog post to clarify. I encourage you to try out the new tools and I hope the perf testing is worth the pizza+.

Thanks. I hope you'll also update the landing page of the challenge.

A little more feedback, which I hope you'll take as constructive:

As I said above, there's quite a difference between "if you do this, you'll win this" and "if you're one of the first 11 people in the United States to do this, you'll win this."

As I see it, if I have any chance of winning the prize, I've got to drop everything right now and scramble to complete the challenge, and even then, who knows how many other people are doing the same thing?

So, my incentive has just dropped from, "This is exciting! I have a decent shot at getting pizza!" to "It's extremely unlikely that I'll win. Why bother?"

I would therefore suggest that you look for ways to increase the value proposition to developers. I'm not saying you have to spend millions -- but maybe find some creative ways to reward developers outside of the first 11, such as by featuring some of the success stories on your blog.

You bet. Feedback well taken jawns and thanks! This has been live for 2 hours so I still think you have an opportunity here.

What if the plan is to change the page after 11 orgs win?

Am I the only person who is sensitive to JPEG artifacts? Look at this image from the article. Why did they use such low quality JPEG?

http://blogs.windows.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver...

That's how you get your 11% performance gains!

Haha. I was kinda thinking if Kraken.io was the culprit there for a bit. ;)

They probably compressed it on quality level 11%

Why did they use JPEG at all? It's a perfect image for PNG.

Pure incompetence.

Wow. No, you're not the only one. Those are some of the worst compression artifacts I've seen in an actual image that wasn't just a compression demo that I've seen in years.

JPEG from article, 18,873 bytes:

http://blogs.windows.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver...

PNG grabbed from actual site: 19,764 bytes:

http://f.cl.ly/items/3w3k2O3n0y0v2W0L1p40/lossless.png

About the same size, much better looking.

Doesn't make up for the fact that I spent most of my time writing workaround for the stupid rendering bugs their "30% faster" browser introduces. Even just basic CSS layouts and constantly wrong in IE.

I know, I don't care if they are objectively the best browser (I doubt they are), my grudge against them runs too deep. I want them to fail. Does that make me a bad person?

No. But then again, I feel the same way, so my opinion may be biased.

It makes you human.

In IE11?

Mildly better, at least I don't have to use a workaround to get transparent PNGs to work anymore. It would be alright supporting just IE11, but you're not, you're supporting IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10, and they all have their own weird bugs.

Here's a challenge:

It would be nice if Microsoft would fix the issues with IE11. Like all the sites that work with IE10, that don't work anymore with IE11. Their solution was to issue an IE11 upgrade blocker with a shitty manual install routine.

Internet Explorer has been and continues to be hostile to the web. It easily makes my job as a web developer at least 50% more difficult which translates into costing my employer more money.

As far as I'm concerned, we as developers need to make a concerted effort to force Microsoft to either adopt WebKit or release a version of IE that is 100% standards compliant.

Diversity of implementations on the web is vital for continued innovation. Though it's less important that IE stick with the Trident engine now that Blink and WebKit 2 have diverged, we should celebrate progress and encourage participation in the standards process - things IE has gotten a lot better about especially in the last two iterations.

> has been and continues to be hostile to the web

I'm going to have to dispute "continues to be": http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+11,firefox+25,chrome+31

You have to scroll down quite a ways before you find feature differences between the browsers, and it's not quite clear which (except maybe Chrome) is the best. If we remove feature drafts, it's a good deal closer.

Now, regarding has been: http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+6,ie+7,ie+8,ie+11

Well, there's no contest there. IE8 being the last supported browser on XP is a harsh reality for web developers. :(

> things IE has gotten a lot better

no it has not. IE9/IE10/IE11 dont even render the same page the same way , dont even get me started on CSS3 support.

You want things to get better ? let Microsoft drop the version number.and update its browsers automatically all the way back to IE8...

Oh , but why should they do that , they make money by making their os obsolete ... /sarcasm.

> IE9/IE10/IE11 dont even render the same page the same way

One could argue this is because each version is better than the previous. "Better" being relative here.

> they make money by making their os obsolete

This touches on a possible source of the problem. Their insistence on tying browser upgrades to major releases of Windows proves they care more about the revenue from the OS sales than they do about not breaking the web.

I'm encouraged that they have automatic updates now but the jury is out as to whether they'll make use of it in the way Chrome and Firefox have.

I agree that diversity of implementations is vital. However, Microsoft has continuously proven its inability to provide an implementation that can even remotely compete. I don't care if its WebKit, Blink, or Servo. But any one of those is better than what Microsoft has insisted on plaguing us with in Internet Explorer.

Now, with regards to IE11, you may be right. And I hope you are. I SINCERELY hope you are!

But with every subsequent release since IE7 I've heard people say something to the effect of, "Its so much better than [insert previous version of IE]" and they were right. Except that; a) the previous version was so beyond bad that fixing one bug would've been a marked improvement and b) the new version STILL paled in comparison to all the other browsers out there.

So if history is any indication, IE11 will be incrementally better but it will still make my job unnecessarily hard and it will still prove itself to be hostile to the web.

Is this an issue with IE11, or an issue with sites built to work with the way IE10 handled certain things that have now been brought better in line with standards?

I know my team had to make an adjustment due to the user agent changes, initially our site loaded in IE11 by stating the user needs IE7 or greater.

Microsoft now gets to continue to reap what they've sown after spending a solid decade pissing off web developers...

"IE11 for Windows 8.1 is our fastest browser yet – 9% faster than IE10 and nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser."

30% then what competitive browser?

Firefox 3?

Cool idea. Unfortunate that they limit things to the first 11 responses.

Wow, the debugger tools looke very nice. Will need to check them out.

Thought so too, but then I remember the lack of "right click->inspect element" and no good plugin api

Click to inspect is in, they even have an example of using it in the linked introduction to developer tools. [1]

/works at Microsoft, but not on IE

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/07/29/debugging-and-...

So basically I disable my CDN, show how slow it is, enable it. BOOM faster. Done.

"IE11 for Windows 8.1 is our fastest browser yet"...and I still don't care, because my user base isn't using IE11.

In fact, I'm lucky if they're on IE9.

I would test for IE, but there's no native Mac client outside of virtualization. Until they match Chrome and Firefox, it will be the browser of graceful degradation for me :(

We need to forget IE for all times, and leave it for M$ own usage

We need to be pragmatic and deliver content to whatever device and software our users use, not hold grumps and use stupid nicknames like "M$".

Microsoft worked hard earning a bad reputation.

These must be really cheap pizzas because last time I checked you couldn't get 11 pizzas at Costco for $120.

Uh, $11 per pizza is plenty enough?

If I recall those big ol' pizzas that they make themselves are around $10 each.

I wonder how they came to a conclusion that a pizza was 10.9090909 each

probably calculated it with javascript

"nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser." - Micro$oft. Absolute crap as can be seen here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413632,00.asp

I'm not loyal at all to any browser. I swop and change (used to use IE, then went to Opera, then Firefox and now to Chrome), but when I hear obvious lies such as IE is 30% faster than any other browser I all of a sudden want to permanently leave IE alone

Why do you think IE9 performance numbers indicate that claims about IE11 performance are lies?

> I'm not loyal at all to any browser.

I don't see why you need to point that out. It's not saving your credibility after writing "Micro$oft" anyway.

I noticed it was both obvious and trivial to add a web page to your home screen. Is that also the case on windows phones? Is it the case on any other phone? Or are webapps treated as second class citizens still on phones?

Internet Explorer SUCKS™[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrMOBKHqqc8

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